Subscribe

Legacy transformation eases constraints

By Suzanne Franco, Surveys Editorial Project Manager at ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 30 Jul 2015
An approach towards transformation that eliminates the need to rewrite legacy applications must always be considered before opting for a rewrite exercise, says Jennitha Chinniah, CEO at In4Group.
An approach towards transformation that eliminates the need to rewrite legacy applications must always be considered before opting for a rewrite exercise, says Jennitha Chinniah, CEO at In4Group.

Legacy transformation eases constraints when it comes to organisations embracing new technology such as on-demand computing, cloud computing and mobile computing.

"Many organisations using legacy applications struggle with revenue losses, operational efficiencies, limitations in integration to other systems, limitation in access to real-time reporting, limitations in ability to automate work flow, key man dependency, increased complex user training and deteriorating user experience," says Jennitha Chinniah, chief executive officer at In4Group, commenting on the results of the ITWeb/In4Group 2015 Legacy Transformation Survey, which ran online for 14 days in June.

Organisations can also feel restricted in leveraging on newly evolving channels from customer interactions, she continues. All of these issues and risks can be addressed by embarking on a legacy transformation journey. In4Group offers a risk-free and quick-time-to-market model of legacy transformation that addresses all of these issues while ensuring the IP invested in these legacy systems are safeguarded.

Chinniah points out the main objective of the Legacy Transformation Survey was to understand the limitations and inefficiencies organisations in South Africa are facing that could be directly attributed to the legacy systems.

The survey results were more or less evenly split when respondents were asked if their organisation is currently using a legacy application, with 52% saying their organisation is using a legacy application, and 48% indicating they are not.

When respondents were asked if they think their organisation is sceptical of migrating to newer platforms, the results were also evenly split with 50% answering no and 50% stating yes.

"Most of the legacy applications were written many decades ago and would have complex screen and business logics embedded into them. These applications are critical to the day-to-day operations of the enterprise, and in most of the cases the people who have written these applications would have retired or be almost approaching retirement age. To add to this most of these systems would not be well documented and hence any exercise to rewrite the system would encompass detailed reengineering activities that are time-consuming, expensive and quite risky," Chinniah comments.

Achieving functional equivalence with the legacy application is critical during such rewrite approaches, she says, which almost always proves to be impossible.

"Hence an approach towards transformation that eliminates the need to rewrite the applications must always be considered before opting for a rewrite exercise. This approach enables organisations to contain and retain the legacy IP while still being able to enhance functionality, Web-enable and achieve service orientation on the existing legacy landscape."

It emerged from the survey that 39% of respondents indicated their internal IT departments spend a great deal of time trying to integrate legacy systems.

"System integration could be very difficult or even impossible when dealing with legacy applications. Even if it is possible, it would be limited integration and thousands of lines of codes would make things more complex to manage in the long run; while increasing total cost of ownership of the application," Chinniah advises.

She believes organisations could leverage toolsets and approaches offered by In4Group to minimise these risks, while integrating legacy environment to other legacy or other business facing environments.

The survey revealed the majority of respondents (64%) do not have a big data strategy in place within their organisation, but are looking to bring legacy data into their big data strategy.

Chinniah comments further: "Given that we live in an information age where customers, employees and decision-makers alike are demanding meaningful information at the tip of their fingers in real-time, this has placed a lot of pressure on internal IT teams of organisations to look for solutions that can extract, transform, load and present data as close to real time as possible."

She explains most organisations have opted to go the extract-transform-load way by moving data from source into big data appliances to provide on-demand reporting and dashboards.

"Even though this approach works for non-legacy applications, it proves to be an expensive and a batch-reliant approach for legacy systems, given that most of the transactional data in big organisations still resides within legacy systems."

Chinniah also states there is an urgent need to review this approach.

"This is where In4Group's real-time data access toolsets come into play, allowing organisations to not only gain real-time access to legacy data but also prepare and present this data in forms of report and dashboards; while not using the main processing capacity of the mainframe. This is true real-time big data," Chinniah concludes.

Share