Today, old legacy applications still serve a critical role in business. They are, however, faced with unacceptably high costs and risk in maintaining their legacy systems. But the cost and risk of leaving these expensive and downright risky behemoths in their wake are often even more unattractive.
Businesses face a number of challenges related to the future of these mission-critical systems that have been at the heart of their operations for up to three decades.
These systems are made up of deeply embedded business logic developed over years that will be very time-consuming and expensive to recreate. The problem is that the knowledge of what the systems contain has been lost over many years or is the exclusive domain of a select few who are about to retire. The risks associated with legacy systems also increase daily due to the potential loss of intellectual property associated with the platform and the increasing scarcity of skills.
Replacing these systems seems unavoidable and business is faced with either finding an appropriate package, which is highly unlikely, as these systems exist because they are addressing unique crucial business requirements, or rewriting the systems.
To do this means enormous cost and time spent gathering requirements, scoping, specifying, implementing/developing, testing and not to mention end-user training and data conversion, which are often underestimated and can each be major undertakings in themselves.
A way out
But there is already an avenue of escape that grows broader every day: automated conversion tools.
Not to say that there isn`t any risk associated with them or that they are without side effects. The technologies to convert legacy applications have existed for some time, but have typically only addressed certain items in the legacy conversion.
One of the biggest problems businesses will face when investigating their options is that there are many. There are tools to convert databases, tools for programming languages, Unix systems that run on mainframe hardware, and an entire range of point conversion software applications. Simply retrieving the data from the old system, preparing and loading it into the new system is generally an enormous undertaking on its own.
Thanks to a series of legacy modernisation projects around the globe, this has matured to the extent that we have the ability to completely automate the conversion and to modernise legacy systems. This means that it is not only moving the legacy to modern hardware and software like J2E or .NET, but that the code is now available in either Java or C# in a modern environment, ready for SOA.
This allows business to easily integrate their systems, create services and add additional functionality.
Modernising your systems this way means a massive reduction in risk and costs are also decreased. And the point at which it is more cost-effective to migrate versus the cost to maintain the system has, in most cases, already been passed.
User training
Another major issue, and one that compounds situations where businesses opt to rewrite their systems from scratch, is user training for the new system when it is delivered.
To get users accustomed to certain way of working requires a huge amount of training, at great expense and with other associated hurdles.
A turnkey solution that converts the mainframe system to a modern platform but emulates the original user interface through a browser allows for gradual, incremental changes. This has obvious benefits. As each change is made to improve the system it can be communicated simply with an e-mail to all users without requiring major rewriting.
The solution is not perfect, but it is eminently pragmatic. It eliminates swathes of risk and is far quicker than rewriting mainframe applications from scratch - by years. It retains all of the existing business logic. It speeds up user acceptance. It maintains uninterrupted operations during the project. It is orders of magnitude less costly than maintaining the mainframe or rewriting the applications.
Businesses will gain operational systems on the platform of their choice with enormously lower maintenance costs, far greater skills availability, and a clear understanding of their programmed business logic.
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