Application Modernization Leveraging the value of enterprise applications Highlights How the Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization solution: Enables developers to deliver up to 40% faster Reduces costs by moving workload to lower-cost platforms Frees up resources to deliver on new high-impact projects
Contents 2 Enterprise Application Modernization 3 The Value of Existing Enterprise Applications 4 Modernization Drivers 5 Enabling Effective Modernization 7 The Micro Focus Application Modernization Offerings 8 1. Application Consolidation and Modernization 8 2. z/os Application Modernization 9 3. Software Platform Rationalization 10 4. Application Migration and Modernization 11 5. Open Systems Application Modernization 12 The Benefits 13 Summary 14 Next Steps 15 Re-using working code satisfies new business demands in a fraction of the time it would take to re-write or replace business-critical applications.
Enterprise Application Modernization Enterprise applications are at the heart of major corporations and the world s economy. They process around 80% of all business transactions. These business-critical applications have been tailored over decades to encompass unique value and deliver competitive differentiation. They are vital to the success of the business, yet a perception persists that it is difficult to update them sufficiently quickly to meet the accelerating pace of business change. As a result, some companies have opted to replace their Crown Jewel applications with off-the-shelf packages. Others have attempted to re-write their core applications in one of the latest computer languages. For the vast majority of organizations, however, neither option provides the new capabilities needed in the timescales required. These projects often run significantly over time and budget or even fail completely, with severe consequences for the business. Re-writing applications is usually unnecessary and creates an unacceptable level of risk with minimal return on investment. Replacing them with packaged solutions inevitably eliminates the unique features that have been built up over the years, diminishing a company s competitive advantage. Enterprise Application Modernization provides a low risk, high return alternative to these strategies. Re-using working code satisfies new business demands in a fraction of the time it would take to re-write or replace business-critical applications. This is because the ability of IT to respond rapidly to new business demands is seldom related to the language in which the applications are written. Rather, they are difficult to update for the simple reason that they are generally the largest and most sophisticated applications within an organization s portfolio. In addition, much of the application expertise is restricted to a handful of key staff, and the tools used to update them have evolved little since the systems were first created. However, these issues can be addressed with appropriate application understanding and effective modernization tools. This enables the heritage and value encapsulated in these applications to be rapidly re-used to deliver additional high-impact business capabilities in a low risk fashion. 3
The Value of Existing Enterprise Applications Investment Years of development and tailoring mean enormous investment and value Alignment The only accurate up-to-date definition of a company s business processes Competitive Advantage Unique functionality that delivers true competitive advantage Reliability Tried-and-trusted business functionality, performing reliably day after day Performance High-speed transaction throughput and unmatched batch process performance. Performance Investment The Value of Existing Enterprise Applications Alignment Competitive Advantage Reliability 4
Modernization Drivers Pressure to reduce annual costs result in regular review of hardware and software environments looking for rationalization and consolidation opportunities. Companies today face a whole array of challenges that drive the need to continually modernize applications more frequently than ever before: Merger and acquisition activity creates duplication of application capabilities which drives the need to rationalize or integrate disparate systems Pressure to reduce annual costs result in regular review of hardware and software environments looking for rationalization and consolidation opportunities Frequent updates to legislation and the need for compliance and conformance mean constant application updates. These types of challenges need to be met just to continue doing business in today s world, but they are not adding value. To add value, IT must deal with a different set of challenges: Updating applications to help support growth in new geographies Delivering systems to support entry into adjacent markets Improving user interfaces and facilities to retain current customers, cross-sell new products and attract new customers. 5
6 Consider the impact existing development teams could make if each developer could deliver 40% faster each day.
Enabling Effective Modernization Drivers for modernization are ever-increasing and the challenges for IT are significant. However, there are techniques to help overcome these challenges and enable IT to complete value-add projects faster, simply by making the most of current staff, their existing skills and the existing applications they understand so well: Providing developers with the best possible tools for understanding, maintaining and modernizing existing applications. Historical mainframe-based tools, have not evolved with the times and are typically 40% less efficient than their contemporary equivalents used on Windows workstations. Consider the impact existing development teams could make if each developer could deliver 40% faster each day. These are the real gains developers are experiencing using workstation-based mainframe development tools. Such dramatic improvements free up a significant amount of resources to tackle value-add projects Exploiting application understanding and documentation tools to enable flexibility in resourcing. Removing bottlenecks by ensuring existing staff can effectively work on multiple applications can have a major influence on IT s responsiveness Begin exposing existing core business functions in Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). The advent of SOAs is bringing new life, and hope, to IT departments struggling to deliver flexible and agile business applications as existing business services held in existing systems can be opened up for re-use by existing and new applications Combining new services with contemporary technologies such as.net or J2EE and associated user interface development tools to rapidly provide the tailored customer-centric user interfaces that business managers are demanding Move data from historical databases and consolidate to relational databases to enable simpler access, easier integration and improved reporting on legacy data Rationalizing outmoded 4GLs, reporting tools and transaction systems to mitigate risk, remove bottlenecks and move towards a single architecture and technology stack Consider moving appropriate legacy workload to lower cost platforms running Linux, Unix or Windows as part of cost reduction or server consolidation initiatives. 7
The Micro Focus APM Solution at Work Application Modernization Offerings Micro Focus, with its unrivalled experience in legacy re-use, offers a range of Application Modernization offerings to unlock the valuable services and data within existing applications, for re-use on any platform and within Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). 1. Application Consolidation and Modernization These capabilities are used to help consolidate servers and systems by migrating applications from proprietary mid-range or mainframe platforms to IBM z/os. With its partners, Micro Focus can help efficiently move applications from any historical mainframe or mid-range platform, regardless of the legacy 4GL or 3GL language the applications are written in, or the proprietary databases they access. During the transition any dependencies on proprietary languages, transaction systems or databases are removed, as the applications are converted to utilize the languages, databases and infrastructure systems already supported within the z/os environment. Tools to automate any such conversions, sometimes by as much as 98%, are the key to reducing risk and keeping on schedule. This not only reduces costs, while ensuring all applications fit in with strategic IT architectures, it is also the first critical step towards application rationalization and modernization using Micro Focus z/os Application Modernization offering. UBS As a result of previous mergers and acquisitions, UBS ended up operating and maintaining two different sets of very costly mainframe environments, resulting in significant operational overheads and disparate IT groups. To address these issues UBS decided to consolidate all applications from its Unisys 2200 mainframes to IBM z/os. In what is regarded as one of Europe s largest migration projects UBS utilized Micro Focus conversion tooling to automate 98% of the conversion, completing the project 4 months ahead of schedule. UBS estimated that savings resulting from shutting down one set of mainframes and consolidating all development, testing and operations were in excess of 100M. This is a really impressive migration; the cost savings we have experienced since moving our entire application portfolio over to the IBM mainframe have been exceptional. Dr. Lansbeat Loacker, Managing Director, UBS 8
2. z/os Application Modernization For organizations that have a strategic commitment to the mainframe but who are struggling to open up existing applications and extend them to meet the needs of the business. Micro Focus offers Windows-based environments to accelerate the development and modernization of applications which run on IBM z/os. The Micro Focus environment works in tandem with existing mainframe tooling to enable development teams to perform 99% of their analysis, development and unit testing on dedicated Windows workstations. This increases productivity, shortens delivery timeframes and reduces mainframe utilization costs during development. Maintenance, governance and compliance activities can be completed 40% faster, releasing critical resources to tackle the high-impact modernization projects which deliver new value. Whether these projects require improved user interfaces, easier access to data or improved integration via SOA, Micro Focus contemporary modernization technology can address these needs considerably faster than utilizing traditional z/os tooling. Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina BCBS had embarked on an enterprise SOA initiative on IBM z/os but their initial solution was too expensive and was not delivering the transaction throughput required to meet future business requirements. After evaluating Micro Focus SOA modernization and support capabilities on z/os, BCBS deployed the Micro Focus solution to help them cost-effectively exploit the key business services within its existing legacy systems to enable IT to respond faster to the business. Having already successfully tested in the same technological framework ourselves, we are delighted that Micro Focus and IBM are working together around our SOA efforts. Since Micro Focus and IBM technologies are central to our SOA strategy, this integration is an important positive step for us. Steve Wiggins, Chief Information Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina 9
3. Software Platform Rationalization Most large organizations have hundreds or thousands of applications developed internally or acquired over decades. Consequently, their portfolio includes applications written in a variety of languages, which use different OLTP systems and databases. Diligent IT organizations regularly review their application portfolio looking for opportunities to rationalize the software platforms or technologies utilized in order to simplify the variety of software they license, manage and operate. The key objective is simplification of the IT infrastructure, funded through the savings realized by removing the annual costs associated with proprietary or seldom used software. The software to be rationalized is typically a proprietary third or fourth generation language, transaction system or database and the objective is to replace these with more standard software already available on the existing hardware platform. With its partners Micro Focus offers the ability to rationalize software platforms by utilizing automated tools to: Convert proprietary 4GL and 3GL to popular languages Banca Intesa Banca Intesa had a portfolio of applications on its IBM mainframe that utilized two different On-Line Transaction Processing systems. The bank was paying for two sets of technology performing the same role, there were obvious operational overheads and having two different architectures impacted responsiveness. The bank therefore turned to IBM and Micro Focus to update over 23,000 programs to utilize IBM CICS, rather than IBM IMS, and update all user interface screens appropriately. Using Micro Focus tools over 98% of the conversion was performed automatically, dramatically reducing risk and costs. Replace historical OLTP systems with the standard OLTP system on the platform Update the database used by any application to a relational database. Our aim was to reduce costs without compromising performance or impacting our end-users and the automated conversion provided by Micro Focus was key to enabling the bank to achieve these objectives while reducing the overall risk of the whole project. Banca Intesa 10
The Micro Focus Application Modernization Offerings 4. Application Migration and Modernization This offering is used by companies who would like to move application workload from mainframe or mid-range platforms to Linux, Unix or Windows servers. Such servers now offer a robust and cost effective alternative to run today s enterprise applications. These platforms also offer a great choice of competitively priced technology that can be exploited to serve the business better. Micro Focus enables organizations to take advantage of such technologies, while making use of the intellectual property already built into existing applications. Tesco Tesco s current supply chain management system monitors and controls its entire in-store inventory. The company has enlisted the assistance of Micro Focus to modernize and extend this z/os mainframe-based system so it can also be rolled out in Tesco s AIX data centers to support its international operations throughout the world including the US. This modernization approach is taken when IT have identified that the costs, risks or inflexibility of running an application or suite of applications on the exiting environment is the key obstacle to satisfying specific business requirements. With its partners, Micro Focus can efficiently move applications from any historical hardware platform, regardless of the language the applications are written in or the databases or OLTP system they utilize. This not only dramatically reduces costs, while deploying applications on the most optimum platform, it is also the first step towards Application Modernization using Micro Focus Open Systems Application Modernization offering. Elements of our common Operating Model are already in place and benefiting some of our businesses. Micro Focus modernization expertise is not only helping us maintain the momentum behind this strategic IT project, but is also playing a key role in the development of our United States presence. This project will help us meet our goal of opening our first store in 2007. Colin Cobain, Group IT director at Tesco 11
The Micro Focus APM Solution at Work Application Modernization Offerings 5. Open Systems Application Modernization This offering is utilized by IT organizations looking to run composite COBOL applications on Linux, Unix or Windows. It includes a comprehensive range of capabilities to enable organizations to develop and modernize applications in an evolutionary, low risk manner by re-using as much of the existing application as possible. Key capabilities include: Ability to re-compile existing COBOL to execute virtually anywhere! Facilities to expose and re-use business logic in a Service Oriented Architecture Ability to integrate COBOL with.net and J2EE Tooling to add GUI or Web based user interfaces to existing systems. Hollywood Entertainment To maintain cost effectiveness, Hollywood Entertainment needed to update its critical DOS based point-of-sale (POS) system after unsuccessful package replacement and re-write projects. Micro Focus provided Hollywood with a way to quickly exploit its critical COBOL applications to get its point-of-sale (POS) system running on the latest commodity hardware running Windows POS while providing a path to improved integration with.net. The company rolled out its upgraded system across 15,000 terminals, re-using the entire 1.3 million lines of COBOL code, to get the new system working in just over three months. After attempting to re-write our entire POS system, Micro Focus came to us with a re-compile solution that not only re-used existing and proven business logic, but also enabled Hollywood Entertainment to meet critical financial objectives. Martin Tromblee, Development Manager of Store Systems, Hollywood Entertainment 12
The Benefits The Micro Focus Application Modernization solution: Provides tools specifically tailored to modernizing existing systems Enables existing staff to deliver up to 40% faster Frees up resources to deliver on new high-impact projects Reduces costs by moving development, testing or even production workload to lower-cost platforms Mitigates risk through the re-use of proven application functionality and by moving from proprietary technologies to open systems technologies Increases agility by accelerating time-to-market through the use of SOA Simplifies infrastructure through the rationalization of platforms, languages and databases. Micro Focus offerings allow you to solve the real issues impacting IT responsiveness by enabling staff to truly exploit the value in existing systems to accelerate time-to-market. 13
Summary Enterprise applications provide unique, mission-critical functionality. They represent enormous investment and deliver competitive advantage. However, they have to move with the times and respond to ever-faster business changes. The question is how? Companies can adopt re-write or replacement strategies, but they risk long, costly projects and business disruption. Modernizing the existing applications is a far more practical, cost effective and less risky route to developing new business capabilities. With its Application Modernization solution, Micro Focus provides a comprehensive portfolio of modernization options that enable organizations to rapidly integrate their existing applications with modern technologies, preserving their critical capabilities while delivering greater value to the business. Micro Focus Application Modernization - a low risk, high return alternative to re-write or replacement strategies. 14
Next Steps We believe that Micro Focus has a unique set of solutions to assist your organization. We can help enhance IT responsiveness by enabling staff to fully exploit the value in existing systems and accelerate time-to-market. Value assessment Schedule a one-hour session with one of our pre-sales consultants to discuss your Application Modernization strategy and learn how Micro Focus capabilities can align with your organization s needs. At the end of the session, we will leave you with a free report: Legacy Renewal Strategies - Ovum. We will contact you within the next few days to see whether you would like to benefit from this free offer. Kind regards Stephen Kelly CEO, Micro Focus 15
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