Modernization of Federal Government Enterprise Assets

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1 Modernization of Federal Government Enterprise Assets Accelerating application development and modernization Highlights How Micro Focus can enable the Federal Government to: Leverage the most from existing IT assets Extend Enterprise Applications via Web services Achieve high performance deployment and portability

2 Rationale for IT change in the Federal Government The drive for federal agencies to become technologically current is unrelenting. This effort is parallel to what is taking place in the private sector. At the same time, given the constraint on resources in both sectors, there is the ever present need to reduce costs. For these reasons it is absolutely vital that valuable development staff have the best tools to maximize their productivity and respond to agency mission needs quickly. As the federal government moves toward a cross agency, governmentwide approach to technology investments and business processes, hardware consolidation is a critically important consideration. This approach is to ensure that services commonly found and used in agencies are provided in a more efficient technological infrastructure. A large portion of any Federal government agency s applications are written in COBOL and run on mainframes. The desire for server consolidation is particularly focused on these COBOL applications and is motivated by four overarching goals: Improved services to citizens Reduced redundancy Realized cost savings Facilitated cross-agency information sharing In many instances, a less than thoughtful response to these objectives is related to completely replacing this large volume of existing COBOL applications by a rip and replace strategy. This incorrect conclusion is drawn from a misinformed set of facts about modern COBOL. The reality is COBOL is available on all popular Windows, UNIX and Linux systems from many hardware providers. Not only are there offerings of sophisticated development and runtime environments for all these systems from a single vendor, Micro Focus, but Micro Focus also provides well-proven migration and extension tools, making the transition to contemporary platforms easy to accomplish. 2 3

3 Lessons learned It is recognized that the rationale for modernization is well founded. However, a rip and replace strategy rather than a well thought out blueprint for Application Modernization and Management approach can be risky. In the white paper IT Consolidation in the Federal Government, INPUT (2005) it points to two glaring examples of this. In one case $170 million spent on a rip and replace government project which was canceled at a $104 million dollar loss. A second example cost the taxpayer $180 million and the newly designed system is still under development. A common factor that caused these failures was the rip and replace approach coupled with lack of a complete application enterprise management approach for the modernization. Micro Focus Support for Enterprise Application Management A first step towards designing and implementing a successful IT modernization is outlined by the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). The OMB (Office of Management and Budget) requires that each agency map its systems and enterprise architecture enabling data architectures to unite different applications. The strategic goal is to implement an enterprise application management approach similar to that being employed in the private sector. That is to use Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for providing the backbone in order to integrate applications and data across platforms enabling quick and easy response to ever-changing agency missions. Micro Focus can deliver to Federal agencies enterprise modernization enabling COBOL applications for SOA and Web services by: Minimizing cost and time to roll out through enhanced developer productivity Reducing risk by promoting high quality software development and testing Increasing ROI by exploiting the potential of existing enterprise applications 4 Micro Focus understands the crucial nature of development tools, and the need for Federal IT organizations to deliver highly functional applications quickly. They have responded to this need by blending existing and new technologies to provide efficient, modern production environments for enterprise applications that enable developers to seamlessly leverage the latest advances in IT. 4

4 Reusing and rebuilding Enterprise Assets with SOA Reusing existing COBOL applications and rebuilding them into contemporary SOA applications can be achieved by using the Micro Focus Net Express development tool. It provides a highly productive Windows based graphical development environment for a variety of target platforms. Developers can use Microsoft Visual Studio facilities and deploy COBOL directly into the.net framework, seamlessly exploiting all the features of that environment. Alternatively, applications can be created for the Java world and be leveraged in a J2EE compliant manner from the major application servers. Interaction between COBOL and Java code becomes a straightforward process. Extending Enterprise Assets via Web services COBOL assets can be modernized and extended using Web services. With the right development tools from Micro Focus, COBOL is quick and easy to develop and can seamlessly exploit the latest.net, J2EE and Web service technologies. Micro Focus Server for SOA provides strategic SOA COBOL deployment that doesn t require J2EE or.net support. COBOL Web services can be directly created allowing COBOL business logic to be extended and deployed without any 3 rd party software or specialized skills. In the modern, distributed world of heterogeneous data sources and disparate data sources, the use of XML based data is common. Net Express also provides the ability to create, consume and update XML documents using familiar COBOL syntax. Federal spotlight on business processes A key area of focus for Federal Agencies is improving and updating their business processes. These include purchasing and informational tasks and those which support core processes such as accounting, recruitment and IT support. Using the current COBOL application base it would be easy to modernize and extend existing processes. COBOL was designed to be easy to understand and is highly structured. It is self-documenting and enforces programming discipline. These are the reasons it has stood the tests of time and scales better than any other language for business processes computing. Major financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies and financial service providers would not be using COBOL for their core systems if it were not capable of sustaining years of change without impacting reliability or performance. The COBOL language has been continuously updated with modern features including support for object oriented programming, graphical user interfaces, XML processing and the latest database technologies. Advanced development tools from Micro Focus take the language even further, providing seamless integration with Windows and open systems technologies, such as Visual Studio and Eclipse. To be or not to be on the Mainframe The mainframe platform has long been the platform of choice for the COBOL developer. However, this platform has long suffered from labor-intensive, inflexible development tools. Micro Focus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition brings the richness of state-of-the-art Windows development environments to IBM mainframe application development with full support of mainframe features. In addition, support for a variety of mainframe COBOL dialects, a broad range of application technologies such as CICS, IMS, JCL, VSAM, DB2 and the IBM language environment are catered for. Mainframe Express dramatically speeds up the development cycle by allowing developers to execute the entire code, analyze, compile, test and debug cycle on a dedicated workstation. PC-based emulators for CICS, IMS, DB2 and Assembler further offload development tasks from the mainframe. 5

5 High performance deployment and portability A key feature of the Micro Focus COBOL architecture is the write once, run anywhere capability it delivers. This is achieved through the Micro Focus Run-Time System (RTS) engine at the core of the Micro Focus Server group of deployment products. These high performance server products provide a robust, proven and portable environment for running COBOL applications on Windows, UNIX and Linux systems. Specific versions enable deployment into the.net framework and cater to the needs of applications migrated from an IBM mainframe. A central theme built in to the design of Micro Focus development tools is platform independence. A common, user friendly development environment can be used to create a single source stream that can be deployed, without change, on a wide variety of target systems, with the Micro Focus RTS providing a consistent, high-performance engine for COBOL execution. The Micro Focus development environment for Unix and Linux provides a powerful and flexible tool for a wide range of 32 or 64-bit platforms. Server Express supports the high volume, fast and reliable transaction processing required on today s high-performance open systems servers. Powerful and secure test data management Even the most sophisticated system test requires the right test data to be effective. Using test data based on actual production data is essential for effective validation, but the use of modified live data creates unacceptable security risks and can contravene privacy legislation. Data Express from Micro Focus provides a powerful solution to the challenges of test data management. It uses innovative techniques to mask sensitive personal information while maintaining the realistic nature of the data. Being the acknowledged leader in COBOL technologies, Micro Focus offers its unrivaled product suite covering all aspects of the application life cycle from analysis through testing. Consequently, it is uniquely qualified to help build future Agency IT infrastructure on solid foundations. For further information please visit Telephone: ext government@microfocus.com 2007 Micro Focus. All rights reserved. Micro Focus is a registered trademark. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. BRMFED1207-US 6