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The Mainframe Challenge

The maintenance and upgrading of existing system has become a major challenge for companies. Refinetm modernizes assets. If a company possesses a large software asset in production, it must consider the manner in which it intends to prevent the "ageing" of this asset, or it will become costly to maintain, inflexible and obsolete.

 

These systems are often "irreplaceable" as there is no "off the shelf" software package adequately covering the specific features of the company's business - developed and tested in a production setting over many years - and the risks of re-writing are too great. In this context, the least expensive and lowest risk approach to avoid "squandering" this precious asset is software modernization, i.e. the analysis and transformation of existing code. Because legacy assets are complex, voluminous and heterogeneous, their modernization requires an industrial approach that can be adapted to each company's specific environments and performance and upgrade requirements.

A Trillion Lines of Code

The mission-critical applications on which major financial, telecommunications, retail, and government agencies depend today have been written over the past 50 years in hundreds of languages with multiple dialects running on multiple platforms. Corporations worldwide have deployed nearly a trillion lines of code into production. Conservative estimates put the number of lines of COBOL in production at over 200 billion.

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Languages such as C, Basic, Pascal, Ada, Fortran, PL/I, RPG, and Jovial account for another 200 billion lines. Even “small” programming languages such as NATURAL account for more than 10 billion lines of code supporting enterprise computing. All of this legacy software runs on a variety of platforms including those from IBM, Digital, Unisys, Tandem, NCR, HP, and Sun, as well as on almost-forgotten platforms of such vendors as Burroughs, Control Data, Sperry, Data General, Wang, Datapoint, and Prime.

Definition of Legacy Applications

Legacy systems are a core asset at many organizations. These legacy systems have been around for decades and have a very critical impact on day to day business processes. However, owing to a variety of reasons, these legacy systems have high TCO and represent a bottleneck towards the emergence of an agile IT portfolio.

A legacy system can be defined as "a computer platform or application program that continues to be used because of the prohibitive cost of replacing or redesigning it, despite its poor competitiveness and compatibility with modern equivalents."

These are typically invaluable assets with embedded business logic representing many years of coding, developments, enhancements, and modifications.

Pain Points of Legacy Systems

Legacy Applications are often undocumented, tightly coupled, and relatively closed and inflexible. In most cases they were developed independently without a consistent underlying architecture, resulting in overlapping and redundant functionality and data.

The main pain points presented by legacy assets can be summarized as follows:
  1. High cost of ownership, including costs of operation, and upgrade of both software and hardware; for
  2. High cost of maintenance because of complex and poorly understood code. This may prevent the system from satisfying the evolving business requirements because simple changes take too long to complete and test. Changes tend to cause significant ripple effects, and require more regression testing. This in turn increases maintenance and evolution costs.
  3. Lack of application knowledge due to the departure of original developers or users as well as missing or obsolete documentation.
  4. Shrinking talent pool of developers skilled in legacy systems and decreasing vendor support. Knowledge of these systems is usually restricted to a core set of people who are difficult to replace.
  5. Closed and outdated technology that is difficult to integrate and interface with new open technologies and modern distributed architectures.

The important point to note is that legacy systems satisfy mission-critical operations and have been doing so for most large organizations for a long time. In addition, legacy systems have enjoyed significant investment from the IT organizations.

Existing systems cost too much, leaving too little money for new business projects.

The total cost of keeping existing applications enhanced, up to date, and running consumes a disproportionate share of the budget. Forrester’s research shows that:

  1. North American and European enterprises spend 75% of their software budgets on ongoing operations and maintenance, leaving just 25% for new investments.
  2. That is not enough funding for projects that can increase revenue and leverage new business opportunities.

 

The burden of maintaining and extending legacy systems that are increasingly cut off from current technology and best practices compels the need for a planned and phased modernization of legacy systems associated with the industrialization of the maintenance and test activities.

The Legacy alternatives

The legacy alternatives:

  1. Do nothing and leaves it as is which means that the technology obsolescence and code entropy of recurring maintenance increase the cost of maintenance, operation and ownership.
  2. Rewrite all of the legacy applications and migrating data involves high cost and enormous complications as demonstrated by numerous failures of such projects.
  3. Replace the legacy apps with software package when available. For example, large groups of internally written financial, manufacturing, and human resources applications have been replaced with packaged application solutions from vendors like Cullinet Software, McCormack & Dodge, and other vendors that no longer exist — in part, a testament to the failure of rip and replace.
  4. Modernize the legacy application.

 

The modernization imperative

Today the business practices of corporations are locked in the software that runs both the online transaction processing systems and decision support systems. The software or code base represents the intellectual property of these corporations. People come and go, but the business practices of the corporation are codified in its software. These business rules are the lifeblood of the corporation, and transformation of the corporation hinges on the ability to modernize the software that codifies these business rules to more modern environments.

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