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By Shashin Shah On 19 Jul 2017
The biggest challenge for enterprises is weighing up present day investment, cost, complexity and ROI versus the maintenance of old systems. The dilemma is choosing between short term problems and risks and long term benefits.
Consider this – Your enterprise has been using large, impenetrable, character-based legacy IT applications built on Mainframe or AS400. Your resources are busy maintaining highly convoluted, millions of lines of codes that are becoming difficult to handle and are gradually losing pace with the more dynamic and networked world. Your competitors and vendors are migrating to cloud-based and Service Oriented Structure (SOA), using agile, web-based, usability driven applications that are scalable and well integrated with other applications for a more organized, innovative, efficient and fast paced business. There have been many acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships based on re-defined business processes that asked for modernized, user-driven applications.
Presently, your legacy applications seem to be performing well. But, the localized mainframe applications were built to carry out silo procedures unable to share code even with same functions.
At times, your enterprise may have difficulties finding vendors and business partners as majority have been moving to Windows, UNIX, LINUX, etc. Also, your company might be overloading mainframe systems and using the last MIPS of expensive power but with regularly deteriorating performance.
Still, your company has been resisting change fearing risk and complexities. But how far can you postpone the inevitable? Does any system come without an expiry date? The answer is ‘No’ and the respite is Legacy Modernization.
What are the Advantages of Legacy Modernization?
Legacy IT Modernization can bring competitive advantage to your enterprise by providing tremendous benefits to IT and business, including:
Reduced Complexity and Dependency: Mainframe has been around for more than four decades, resulting in millions of lines of COBOL code that is becoming too cumbersome to manage. The procedural programming is based on instructions and can be used by well-trained resources only. Moreover, the universities worldwide now teach new age languages that leaves few retired or soon to retire resources of languages like ADSO, IDEAL. The scarcity of resources and depending on legacy skills is not only expensive, but also slows down the business. Modernization of legacy applications to open, agile, web-based systems helps to deal with legacy crisis. Also, any developer trained on new languages can easily maintain them.
Enterprises using Mainframe have their hands tied – they know they are paying too much for the security and reliability that they have been enjoying since ages. They realize the advantage of more efficient yet cheaper platforms, but are apprehensive of legacy IT modernization.
The Real Challenge
The biggest challenge is weighing between present day investment, cost and complexity, and ROI versus maintenance of old systems. The dilemma is choosing between short term problems and risks and long term benefits.
So how do you decide if your company is ready for Legacy modernization? Check if your legacy applications to meet your business needs? Consider how old your mainframe systems are, analyze present operating cost, and check out modernization strategies like screen-scraping, application integration, replacement with COTS offerings, re-hosting business logic and data to agile platform Or re-structuring to C++, Java or .Net like architectures.
Wrapping Up
Choose the options that work best for your enterprise. The result should be overhauled, efficient applications that are built on the strengths of the past, provide competitive advantage to your enterprise, and help you in facing future business challenges.
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Shashin Shah has been an expert in the Information technology field for more than twenty years. His experience globally and in the US, spanning across several industries has greatly contributed to his unparalleled skill set. Currently, Shashin is working as Chief Business Officer at DTES division of Happiest Minds, where he is primarily handling Pimcore Global Services. Pimcore is 100% open source consolidated platform for PIM, MDM, DAM, WCM & Ecommerce.
Shashin Shah Shashin Shah has been an expert in the Information technology field for more than twenty years. His experience globally and in the US, spanning across several industries has greatly contributed to his unparalleled skill set. Currently, Shashin is working as Chief Business Officer at DTES division of Happiest Minds, where he is primarily handling Pimcore Global Services. Pimcore is 100% open source consolidated platform for PIM, MDM, DAM, WCM & Ecommerce.
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