COMMENTARY--After a quick read of today’s information technology press, you’d think the world’s information systems are based on nothing more than Java and Web Services.
But the reality is that the bread and butter applications of most large organizations still run in legacy environments. In fact, more than $1.5 trillion has been invested in Cobol applications, and more than 30 billion Cobol transactions occur daily--that’s more than the total number of Web page hits on any given day.
The same Global 1000 companies that run the majority of their vital business operations on legacy systems are struggling to maintain and enhance those applications--but with fewer resources. On one side, declining budgets have forced teams to perform more activities with fewer resources. On the other side, the pool of professionals with skills in mainframe technologies is declining as developers retire and move on. In fact, the Gartner Group estimates that between 60 and 80 percent of an average company’s IT budget is spent simply on maintaining existing mainframe systems and applications.
Yet these businesses aren’t about to throw away their massive investment and institutional experience to hastily move to new architectures--especially after their massive tuning effort in the lead-up to Y2K. Instead, it will be companies that take an incremental approach to modernization in order to reduce maintenance costs and renovate their systems that will likely be the business and technology leaders of the future.
The simple fact is that maintaining legacy applications is expensive and time consuming. For instance, one of the largest global financial services firms has 600 Cobol programmers working every day to support mission-critical, mainframe-based applications. Companies must make legacy code developers more efficient in their efforts to maintain a massive collection of mainframe code, which often requires days of tedious analysis to invoke even the simplest changes and fixes.
As changes to legacy applications add up over the years, the systems become progressively more brittle. Modifications are often left undocumented due to time pressures, leaving development teams with little insight into hundreds of millions of lines of fragile code. Consequently, much of the day-to-day work of maintaining and enhancing applications requires impact analysis – tedious manual searches that sort through line after line of code.
Market pressures increasingly demand that businesses respond rapidly to change, or risk losing customers. Also, regulatory issues such as compliance with HIPAA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act compel companies to fully comprehend and control their business processes. Without adequate understanding of their legacy applications, companies lose control of their business processes and jeopardize both their market and legal positions.
This compels businesses to find a solution that provides speedy and thorough analysis of these applications including impact analysis, plus the ability to enhance and renovate the system in order to organize the complex code. Relying on a solution such as this is the most effective strategy for application modernization.
Effective application modernization
As a business develops, it integrates accumulated experiences and strategies into its existing legacy applications. To simply abandon these applications is to lose a significant competitive advantage. The most effective solution is to preserve and renovate the critical business processes by developing an incremental modernization roadmap. Such modernization efforts reduce operational and maintenance costs associated with management of existing technology, as well as open up applications to more progressive capabilities such as integration and Web services.
Utilizing a roadmap to modernize applications, companies can increase agility and response to prevailing business challenges. Successful modernization programs include:
• detailed analysis and assessment of existing applications
• insight into and isolation of complex business rules
• target architecture aligned with the overall needs of each organization
• accurate assessments of the amount of resources necessary to implement each of the plan’s options
Following such a roadmap helps your team to more efficiently maintain and enhance your application portfolio--and move on to more valuable and forward looking activities. Further, the roadmap can guide you towards the renovation and re-architecting of legacy applications in order to improve efficiency and leverage emerging technologies.
With intense pressures to reduce costs and stay competitive, organizations must understand how best to approach application modernization. Following an incremental roadmap that lets your organization accrue benefits without losing institutional expertise gives companies a low risk strategy--with potentially tremendous benefits.
biographyCharles Dickerson is vice president of marketing and product management for Relativity Technologies.
