South African companies should guard against "rip-and-replace" integration strategies and should carefully determine their requirements before investing in integration solutions, says CommerceQuest SA MD, Alex Steyn.
She says many South African companies have built robust business-critical applications that reside on legacy systems. Many of these legacy applications supply companies with their core business needs.
"We don't encourage companies to 'rip out and replace' their legacy systems. We much prefer to see companies integrate their legacy systems with more modern, more functional systems. Shortening the length of a legacy integration project saves time and money, therefore, is far more cost-effective. Often larger companies have 'solid' in-house legacy skills with knowledge of their legacy systems, so they are able to quickly and efficiently maintain, modify and manage these robust legacy systems," she says.
"There is no doubt that legacy platforms, such as mainframes, are extremely reliable in delivering 100% uptime which is a huge benefit in today's demanding market where access via the Web - day and night (24x7x365) from anywhere in the world - is required as a standard business requirement today. For instance, if the mainframe system was not available or services were disrupted in order to implement a 'newer' solution with the 'rip out and replace' method, there is no way of calculating the financial losses that may be suffered by a company through perhaps lost orders or customer dissatisfaction," Steyn says.
"Legacy systems are here to stay! However, one of the drawbacks for users of legacy applications is that often the user has to interface with a green screen, which is complex, lacks functionality, is often cumbersome, difficult to use and can be difficult to manage," she says.
Instead of replacing the mainframe or any green screen application to provide a more user-friendly alternative, Steyn suggests companies investigate solutions from Jacada. Jacada provides solutions for presenting green screens in a Web page format and can also provide a way to integrate legacy systems into already developed Web-based applications via open standards.
"The solution should provide the user with a screen that has a Web look and feel. In other words, the user would be able to use the mouse to click and point, and operate drop down menus instead of tabbing through multiple screens. Just imagine a green screen application that is transformed to show the company logo in full colour, operate drop down menus with all the functionality you associate with the Web which is now be available to the user," Steyn suggests.
When asked why CommerceQuest SA, a respected integration solution provider, chose to market Jacada locally, she said: "We had a gap in our integration offering where we were unable to help customers transform their legacy applications into modern day applications. We were looking for something more than a 'screen scraping' tool. Jacada was a perfect fit for us providing the ability to interface between host systems and any other applications via open standard architectures either Java and .Net. Jacada gave us a new offering to market in our integration solution products portfolio."
Steyn says SA companies are very cost-conscious when it comes to IT projects. "A large company in SA is a considered a relatively mid-size company in the US or Europe, and local companies do not have large budgets available to revamp systems, do R&D, or allocate to training. This means companies should also look for a solution that will be cost-effective to implement. Ideally, the solution should be wizard-driven to speed up development which will reduce the cost of implementation and training," she says.
Steyn suggests companies looking for a legacy integration solution investigate the time involved to implement a potential solution carefully. "Does it take weeks or months to implement the solution? Fast implementation saves on services costs and is far less disruptive to the business," she explains.
Finally, Steyn suggests that an integration solution of this kind should be totally "non-intrusive".
"This means the legacy system itself is not touched in any way. Often IT system administrators will fight against new or 'foreign' software being loaded on their stable operating environments - and with good reason. So find an integration tool that is non-intrusive and leave the legacy system well alone," she concludes.
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