Nobody wants to be saddled with clunky, obsolete legacy applications. After all, the core systems have undergone so many changes over the years that the source code has become defunct and virtually impossible to update.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, these apps may not offer good Web integration options, handle data slowly and clumsily, have connectivity and integration problems, offer little room for adding new services and functions and often get little or no support from the companies that created them.

Still, you invested plenty in these legacy apps back in the day, and you want to leverage whatever value they have left while you migrate to newer technology. The question is, how can you migrate without breaking your budget or spending too much time on the project?

Legacy migration: An intimidating process

At first glance, migrating from your legacy system to more-modern technology can seem intimidating.

While legacy languages like COBOL have a few more years of useful life left, platform-dependent languages such as Assembler and JCL, legacy software such as JES, VTAM, RACF, IMS, CICS and IDMS and legacy operating systems such as GCOS, MCP, MPE, VME, VSE, OS/390 and MVS are quickly gathering dust.

Meanwhile, the number of people who know mainframe technology and legacy languages is dropping rapidly. It can be very hard to pull together a team which can help you through a successful migration from old to new, and especially to find experts who can keep the legacy system running throughout the process.

How Netspective can help?

You don’t need to get stuck in the legacy apps trap. Netspective has put together an unbeatable team of legacy technology experts who can make your legacy support and maintenance projects a success.

Over the years, Netspective has put together a suite of automated migration tools, proven migration methodologies and top-notch expertise to help organizations maximize the value of their legacy systems.

Using compilers from companies such as Micro Focus and Fujitsu, engineers at Netspective can run COBOL applications on the Windows platform, leaving 80 to 90 percent of the code intact. Ultimately, we can help you re-use can close to 100 percent with new runtime environment from these compilers.

Profitable, worry-free legacy transitions

Working with Netspective on your legacy modernization effort offers many benefits, including the following:

• Creating a flexible IT environment, with new architectural paradigms like SOA allowing you to add new services and functionalities
• Squeezing more out of your existing application investments
• Helping you switch focus from legacy application maintenance to development of new functions and enterprise innovation
• Eliminating connectivity and integration issues, reducing application response times and improving data handling
• Reducing cost of maintaining of legacy systems, resulting in substantial savings in your IT budget.

Today, most companies run applications in many different languages. In most cases, these apps use varied programming interfaces and protocols and run in multiple operating environments. Though they may work well independently, these systems are difficult to integrate, scale poorly and may not be very reliable. Unfortunately, few enterprises can solve their integration problems by dumping the old systems in the dustbin. Many of these legacy systems have been around for ages and continue to play a crucial role in day-to-day operations. Replacing them completely would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Besides, in most cases a forklift upgrade doesn’t make much sense financially.

Instead, many enterprises are turning to a flexible, scalable infrastructure known as service-oriented architecture to integrate the old with the new. And Netspective is helping them get there.

Service-oriented architecture’s advantages

Service-oriented architecture is a loosely-coupled architectural design which turns an application’s business logic into modules or individual functions; those modules or functions are then presented as a service. Communication between the service and its client is through self-describing, platform-independent interfaces.

Service-oriented architectures help clients and services communicate and understand each other, no matter what platform they run on. Clients on an SOA platform can tap into a service from anywhere, on any OS, and in any language. Meanwhile, enterprises can plug in new services as needed.

Service-oriented architectures offer several advantages:

• SOA is platform-agnostic and allows communication between applications written in different languages and built on different platforms.
• SOA enables re-use of existing technology by treating functions within them as services, resulting in substantial cost savings.
• SOA enables the creation of new composite applications that leverage the strengths of existing applications
• SOA offers considerable amount of scalability allowing organizations to add new functionalities and services as new requirements arise.

Using service-oriented design, Netspective can help you squeeze more out of your current business processes and existing technology stack.

Netspective’s service-oriented architecture practice

Netspective’s veteran integrators use an integrated and open-standards based set of tools, tied to industry best practices and methodologies, to support organizations in their SOA efforts.These tools are specifically designed for building successful SOA rollouts.

Our SOA solutions are interoperable and fully modular, allowing organizations to select and add components on an enhance-as-you-grow basis. This scalability allows organizations to start small and grow as fast as the business requires.