Modernising legacy applications through rapid service enablement

The problem with legacy applications

Legacy applications typically make up an organisation’s transactional backbone. They span accounting, inventory management and purchase support, among other essential functions across the enterprise. If they falter, you can assume business will falter too. A legacy malfunction can virtually paralyse the day-to-day operations of a company.

Another attribute of legacy applications is their ability to accumulate data and processes that could be put to profitable use across the business.

Enterprises have to find effective ways to re-use their legacy applications. When customers call a vendor for support, they expect the person on the other end of the phone to know everything about their account, from purchase records to previous account and service history.

To meet these expectations, company agents must have rapid, easy access to customer records, regardless of where they originated. But most legacy applications were built to operate independently within the business, so companies usually rely on a couple of methods to modernise and re-use legacy applications, ‘rewrite’ and ‘replace’.

You can always rewrite your old applications so that they can talk to newer technologies. This approach lets you address your exact needs as they arise. However, rewriting is enormously expensive, time consuming and error prone. The success of this approach calls for a thorough understanding of the mainframe applications and the way they work.

An alternative is to replace applications with new ‘packaged applications’ but they are not tailored to the business and typically require an extensive implementation and customisation effort. Like the ‘rewrite’ option, this is by nature a big, unwieldy and risky effort.

There is another way using new methods to modernise legacy applications.  Service enablement lets you re-use the business applications and databases you already have, while leaving the functional legacy logic in place. With the service enablement approach, you wrap application components and expose them for re-use. When you do that, current technologies are then able to plug into and leverage your legacy assets. This method easily allows extension of previously lock-up host applications, making them agile and accessible across the enterprise.

Service enablement, while a big technological improvement, can still be daunting. It’s easier to take on individual management projects that ultimately lead to modernised systems but require simpler immediate steps. The key to successful modernisation lies in making each project small and, taken as a whole, it’s a strategic process becoming known as rapid service enablement.

But rapid service enablement is definitely worth considering. A rapid services approach is similar to enterprise-wide service enablement, except for some significant process distinctions. There are four basic steps to achieve rapid service enablement.

The first one is to connect to legacy applications using a non-invasive approach. This enables you to shorten implementation and approval times. Risk is also reduced as no modifications are made to host systems or applications.

The second step is to model the legacy application using a specialised modern design tool. A market-provided tool, tailored to this task, speeds up the process and again risk is reduced as this approach has been proven by many companies.

The third step is to create base level services from the legacy application. Exposing standards-based services allows easy re-use and hand coding is avoided, so you reduce the complexity of the project. Ongoing maintenance can also be minimised and simplified.

Lastly, the fourth step is to use a standards-based orchestration tool to build governing services. Standards-based tools lowers the skill sets needed to build and maintain the solution and dependencies on host staff are alleviated. With standard tools, your created business processes are not locked in proprietary containers and you ensure long-term safety as each completed project follows a correct services method using current best practice technologies.

Making a case for rapid service enablement

Service enablement does not have to be an all or nothing effort; instead you can (and should) tackle projects on an individual basis. The work you do now can be re-used at any time, to implement other solutions. The incremental approach allows you to successfully modernise an application without the need to disrupt the entire IT infrastructure.

Quick turnaround is another key point to remember when making the case for rapid service enablement in your organisation. When working with a well-contained small project, you can set investment questions to rest by identifying a short time to completion.

In conclusion, if you need to tackle legacy modernisation and you don’t have time to waste, consider rapid service enablement. It can help you meet the needs of the project, while exceeding expectations of traditional approaches, leaving the business in a much better position.

*Colin Barnetson, Integration Solutions Specialist, Attachmate, Asia Pacific