Periodic application modernization is essential to maintaining a healthy, robust information infrastructure. Rapid and sometimes momentous change is the nature and reality of the IT industry today and it’s not likely to go away anytime soon! New technologies and standards emerge and fade away with frightening regularity. The impact on corporate IT as well as Independent Software Vendors is a chronic challenge and stress on the bottom-line that must be addressed.
So why modernize? Because we ultimately must in order to stay competitive. It’s simply a matter of choosing the best approach. Developing and maintaining a dynamic modernization strategy as part of any IT plan has the following benefits:
- Reduces the total cost of ownership for your applications
- Leverages new technological advances for business advantage
- Keeps the organization focused on business rather than technology
- Enables effective decision making with regard to new application development technology investments
- Reduces the risk of being stuck on an antiquated platform with no support
- Provides confidence in the longevity of new application development investments
There are several approaches to modernization, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. These range from total application rewrite to various methods for code migration. We feel that any modernization effort should accomplish the following objectives:
- Retain the value and extend the investment in the source application
- Minimize the significant risk that is inherent in a total application rewrite
- Spend significantly less than a total rewrite
- Enable refactoring and rearchitecture as part of the migration
- Deal with concurrent development on the source platform so that new functions can be integrated into the target application
- Deliver stable, readable, documented application code that fully utilizes the features of the target platform
- Provide a platform for on-going development and application evolution
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