The Micro Focus "Lift and Shift" migration strategy offers businesses the most reliable modernisation strategy to unlock the value of legacy. This is achieved by a combination of the Intel hardware platform, Microsoft server technology and Micro Focus Enterprise Server deployment platform, and results in significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a more agile application infrastructure.
While the economy shows sins of long-term improvement, market conditions continue to put pressure on organisations` costs. At the same time, businesses are seeking to deliver more value per application rand.
To dramatically lower costs and drive business agility at lower risk, three conditions now make it possible to migrate mainframe applications to the Windows and .NET platform. These include:
* Intel multi-microprocessor architecture delivering higher processing power at much lower cost;
* The availability of an alternative lower cost, industrial software platform provided by Microsoft Windows and .NET;
* The extension of the Windows platform to support mainframe COBOL and CICS applications with the Micro Focus Enterprise Server, distributed and supported by MigrationWare in SA.
When it comes to a modernisation strategy, organisations seeking to modernise their legacy systems have three options:
"Rip and Replace" is an extremely high-risk strategy, this approach is not favoured by most organisations, due to the time, cost and risk involved, with 74% of these projects either failing completely or significantly late and over budget.
Packaged Applications offer a generic alternative, forcing organisations to do business as dictated by the package`s functionality. This results in lost workflow that is fundamental to the way a business operates and involves complex data re-modelling and re-training. According to Garter, 42% of implementations are never completed or are more than 50% late - also a high-risk approach.
The `Lift and Shift` strategy offers a migration approach that dramatically lowers hardware and software costs by enabling low risk migration of COBOL/CICS applications to a modern, open and extensible platform, unlocking the value of a legacy system.
Micro Focus distributors MigrationWare, which recently announced the release of Micro Focus Enterprise Server, a transactional environment for COBOL applications, has now announced the Mainframe Transaction Option (MTO) for the Enterprise Server to enable support of COBOL/CICS applications on Windows.
Businesses running legacy applications on IBM mainframes should consider Lift and Shift as the cornerstone of significantly lower TCO for both individual applications and complete systems. Enterprises can exploit the COBOL/CICS capabilities of Enterprise Server to minimise risk, while delivering the agility offered by moving to an open platform, free of restrictive and expensive mainframe infrastructure, where the application can be extended freely using contemporary technologies.
"When evaluating the merits of any COBOL or COBOL/CICS migration project, there are both business and technical drivers which need to be considered. These can include reducing overall annual hardware and software expenditure, entering a new market or integrating self-service capabilities by exploiting the Internet, minimising disruption to business continuity by mitigating risks, a consolidation initiative around a single target platform, such as Windows and .NET or delivering systems that can be adapted rapidly to exploit new opportunities," said Joao de Oliviera, CIO for MigrationWare.
"Similarly, when considering migration, it is necessary to look for triggers, such as impending new expenditures, such as hardware leases or a mainframe upgrade, IT assessments, such as costs and time to integrate diverse systems on mainframe are prohibitive, or external influence - namely industry measures above the norm, the withdrawal of vendor support or capacity problems."
"The typical mainframe with hardware and software outlay costs in the order of $10 million, with very high recurring maintenance fees, whereas the Windows Data Centre Environment with the equivalent number of processors and software, including Micro Focus Enterprise Server, would be in the order of $500 000 - a dramatic difference in costs," said De Oliveira.
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Through its experiences in the application migrations arena and through its relationship with its partners, MigrationWare offers a broad spectrum of solutions for the migration, renovation or renewal of application systems and data. MigrationWare is the sole distributor of Micro Focus and Trillium Software, placing the company firmly in the data profiling and cleansing arena, while covering a broad spectrum of customer requirements in critical projects such as e-business, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, data warehousing and complex integrations.
For further information, contact MigrationWare on 021 447 6570 or visit www.migrationware.com.
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