What do you mean by Legacy Modernization?
This is the basic question asked by many today. For some
legacy Modernization means moving of the Legacy Applications like Mainframe,
VB, etc to newer technology like SOA, Web services, JAVA, .NET, Oracle HRMS,
etc. This was basically what people used to think. Even Clients used to
consider the same and used to slowly tread their path into such a venture.
Though they knew that the transformation process will be a very costly and time
consuming activity but, even then every IT division of a company used to
consider this because of the high TCO for mainframe, niche skill set and
loosing of old and trusted programmers from their company.
Every IT division of a company whether it’s a retailer or Banking
is always least budgeted, since that’s not their core business. But everyone
knows at their backdrop that the systems are old and they would have to change
those to meet newer challenges of modern Industry. New Technologies that will require
less maintenance cost but will give same throughput like the Mainframes. Many
Architects would have analyzed various software, packages, etc to come to a
conclusion which would be easy to implement, robust and cost effective. But in
all cases such transformation we have seen takes roughly 2 to 3 years to
implement. And by the time they get implement the vendor support for that
package or software is not there and its time to upgrade as well. And not
forgetting the cost incurred for such a transformation, and it would have gone
past all expectations. And then when we start comparing the Cost VS Benefit
ratio, we would have found only after 5 or 6 years they would start getting
profit. (I mean the cost of implementation, migration and support for next 6
years VS the cost that the client would have incurred if they would have
allowed the application to run for another 6 years in mainframe).
So basically for any Service Industry personnel it was a
very tough job to make the client believe in such a transformation. And also
for the Client it was a very tough job to accept such a proposal and go for it.
What is Re-hosting?
In legacy Modernization framework, apart from the above
mentioned solutions just discussed there is another very new thought process
that has come up. I should not say new but yes this is the talk of the Industry
currently. That’s re-hosting.
Re-hosting is nothing but a ‘Lift and Shift Approach’. Here
a legacy application is moved out of mainframe and run on Windows or UNIX or
Linux platform with minimal or no changes. “Sounds very new right, and
unbelievable as well”
But yes that’s true your COBOL programs, JCL batch jobs,
Online CICS transactions are running in Windows/Unix/Linux platform. Almost all
normal Mainframe utilities, sort jobs, etc. are running. So this is what is
called the essence of Re-Hosting. With Minimal changes to an application it
gets moved to distributed platform. Typically this takes not more than 6 or 8
months depending upon the portfolio of applications migrating and their
complexity. Many people have a notion that at the backend it must to
interacting with the mainframe. But its not true, really mainframe is no more
there.
Now the Million Dollar Question is how is this possible?
Currently in the market there are couple of solutions that
various companies have come up with like – Fujitsu, Clerity solutions, Micro
Focus, Oracle Tuxedo 11gR2, etc.
They have their own emulation middleware that supports CICS
programs and JCL streams in open system environment. This in turn eliminates
the need of converting them into another technology.
The only thing that worries people now is whether the
application will run as is without any performance bottleneck in open System.
Currently these are addressed by proper load balancing mechanism and trust me
it works, and at times it works faster than mainframe.
The other thing that needs to be kept in mind is that not
all Mainframe languages are supported in these solutions. Other mainframe
languages needs to be converted to COBOL and databases to DB2 UDB, Oracle, SQL Server,
etc. For this there are numerous tools that are available in the market which
can do such conversion.
Following are a typical migration phases that a Re-hosting
project undergoes –
- Evaluation
Phase – Here the application Portfolio is analyzed, proper estimates are
done, Project Plan are created and timelines are shared
- Re-Hosting
- During this time the application is re-hosted to open system
environment, in-compatible components are re-engineered either by tool
based or manually, and tested.
- Integration
Testing, System Testing and UAT
- Deployment
- Post
Production Support
Depending upon the size and complexity of the application
portfolio a typical migration project gets implemented within 6 to 8 months.
And the most important thing cost vs benefit ratio, when
checked, we have found that in most cases in 2 to 3 years time the client
starts realizing the profit from their IT expenditure.
