Thursday, 12 July 2007

Study: Organisations Have New Priorities for Legacy Systems

A worldwide customer survey done to gauge customers’ concerns regarding their legacy systems and future plans for those systems has revealed some interesting new developments. The study, which was conducted by Software AG, a business infrastructure software solutions provider during the last quarter of 2006, indicates...

A worldwide customer survey done to gauge customers’ concerns regarding their legacy systems and future plans for those systems has revealed some interesting new developments.

The study, which was conducted by Software AG, a business infrastructure software solutions provider during the last quarter of 2006, indicates that respondents have moved away from the IT-centric considerations such as cost savings and platform consolidations to place a more primary focus on legacy systems. It also indicated that organisations are concerned with business-centric issues such as real-time access to legacy data, agility and flexibility to meet business demands.

Done on some 180 customer organizations, the survey also revealed that, “respondents no longer look predominantly to rewriting, replacing or outsourcing as the primary strategies for dealing with legacy systems. Modernization is now the overwhelming preference.”

More than 60% of respondents analyzed were “very” or “extremely” concerned about “the flexibility of this [legacy] system to be quickly modified to meet changing business requirements.” Nearly 60% of respondents analyzed were “very” or “extremely” concerned about “real-time interaction between this [legacy] system and other systems to support business process automation.”

“The results of our recent global customer survey clearly show that legacy systems are being positioned by IT organizations as significant players in the new enterprise,” said Joe Gentry, CTO of Enterprise Transaction Systems, Software AG.

“Customers are no longer asking, ‘How do we get rid of these systems?’ Instead they are asking, ‘How do we take the business value that already resides in our legacy systems and bring this value into our new enterprise architecture to deliver business results?’”

Software AG recommends a step-by-step process to successfully address organizations’ concerns about their legacy systems, including the ability to support real-time access to operational data and the flexibility to meet changing business requirements. This process is based on Five Disciplines of Legacy Modernization:

• Application Understanding and Optimization – Enables analysis and enhancement of legacy code, leading to improved knowledge transfer and reduced maintenance efforts

• Web Enablement – Provides new user experience through Web 2.0 and AJAX, extends the reach of legacy systems and improves service to customers and business partners

• SOA Enablement – Facilitates reuse of legacy functionality within an SOA, supports automation of business processes (BPM), links legacy systems with SOA governance

• Application and Data Integration – Improves performance and availability, yields data that is more current for reporting and data warehouse environments

• Platform Optimization – Reduces operational costs and the risk of diminishing expertise by moving an application or database from one software or hardware platform to another

Software AG’s Legacy Modernization solutions use Web services and AJAX in the context of an SOA to build on the performance and reliability of an organization’s core business systems in order to meet new business and IT challenges.

The full report entitled, “Customer Survey Report: Legacy Modernization” (June 2007) is available for free download at this URL:www.softwareag.com/Corporate/Images/SoftwareAG_SurveyReport_Jun07_tcm16-30103.pdf