Going to AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas? The TSRI team is. The magic number to remember for accelerating and assuring your software modernization projects is 846. That’s our booth at the event where you’ll find our team and hear about our advanced JANUS Studio® solution to modernize your software applications to the AWS cloud.
DON'T GAMBLE WITH SOLUTIONS WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR CODE.
CONNECT WITH THE EXPERTS AT TSRI.
AWS Mainframe Migration Competency Partners
As a vetted and validated AWS Mainframe Migration Competency partner, TSRI provides rapid, low-risk software modernization for deployment on AWS.
Stop by to see how the TSRI team has strategically planned and executed hundreds of successful modernization projects. We’ll be ready to discuss the business and technical details of our modernization solution and answer questions about how TSRI transforms more than 35 different languages operating without code-freeze and business disruption in a graceful, step-wise manner.
GAIN A FAST ADVANTAGE
AWS ISV Accelerate Program Member
At the booth, you can get a head-start on launching projects from kick-off and execution to ongoing operations on the AWS cloud. Because TSRI has earned membership in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, we offer prioritized access to the AWS co-sell support team to drive faster adoption of ISV solutions. That means our customers get access to valuable resources that provide guidance to achieve better results through collaboration with the powerful AWS Sales and Account Management organizations.
YOU'VE GOT QUESTIONS
We've got over 250 successful migrations to reference
We speak from experience. TSRI has transformed some of the most secure and mission-critical military, government, and finance systems in the world to full business operations in cloud-ready modern languages. Our team at AWS re:Invent would love to share insights from real-world case studies across a broad range of industries.
— Ask us how we saved Pitney Bowes 97% on their annual Total Cost of Ownership by moving them—without disruption—from COBOL on an HP NonStop Tandem mainframe to a modern C# .NET Core application in production on AWS.
— You might also want to know how it only took six weeks to move the Canada Revenue Agency’s Help Desk application to AWS—while reducing their annual system maintenance costs by 80%.
— While you’re there, find out how we achieved a 99.9996% automation rate in modernizing all but one or two lines of code while transforming Educational Testing Services (ETS) from COBOL and JCL to Java and Python on AWS. That included a high-transaction batch system, DB2 and VSAM to PostgreSQL, as well as a very large number and variety of sort cards that required automation. We would love to tell you how we did it—and show you what we can do for you!
STOP BY BOOTH #846 OR PRE-SCHEDULE YOUR VISIT NOW
We love talking about this stuff. That’s partly why we love AWS re:Invent so much. It’s our chance to meet you face-to-face.
Our team of experts will be available to answer questions about your specific application modernization scenario, provide demonstrations, and share case studies of TSRI’s successful modernization projects spanning government, military, finance, insurance, retail, and many other industries. To get expert one-on-one modernization advice at AWS re:Invent put yourself on our calendar now.
Schedule a Session
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Proven by Decades of Results. Prove It for Yourself.
For decades, TSRI clients have been discovering a dramatically faster, more accurate, and less expensive AI-based and automated modernization process. We’ve earned a place as the go-to resource for enterprise corporations, government, military, healthcare, and more. Now prove it for yourself. Find out how the proprietary TSRI modernization process delivers future-ready, cloud-based code in any modern language in a fraction of the time.
See Case Studies
Learn About Our Technology
Get Started on Your Modernization Journey Today!
In stark contrast to its 2021 numbers, the US Federal Government expects to end this fiscal year (2022) with a surplus of $308 billion dollars according to the Congressional Budget Office. (As opposed to last year’s $226 billion deficit.) While that excess fuels clickable headlines for politicians, it’s not great news if your agency or department uses less budget than you predicted—while possibly falling short of longer term goals such as software modernization.
“Use it, or lose it” is a real thing that has caused Federal Government agencies and departments to lose or cut over $127 billion between 2009 and 2019. In one stark example from 2019, the Department of Defense had to return $80 billion in unused budget.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the average amount of budget fund cancelation is about 1.6% annually. While that number doesn’t sound large, it can have an erosive effect on your budget and create a downward trend that can be more difficult to reverse down the road when increases could be genuinely needed. And while the examples above are government figures, the principle is the same in the private sector—or even more tightly policed.
So, what can you do as we near the end of your fiscal year if you find yourself with that ugly surplus—even of a measly one or two percent or less? We’ve got four suggestions for you:
1. NOTCH YOUR ARROWS FOR NEXT YEAR
Take some time to cast ahead to your fiscal 2023 strategy. What updates and improvements would you like to see by the end of next year?
Knowing that you have money in your coffers ahead of time, consider what additional resources, technology, or assistance will help you achieve those goals. Are there moderate investments such as modernization planning that you can make this year that could give you wiggle room should the vagaries of budget and crisis change your situation next year? Are there plans you’d like to lock in now?
As you envision what next year should look like, consider software modernization. One smart use of funds ahead of a modernization project is using the final couple of months of this year to get an assessment for your program. It only took TSRI six weeks to assess the entire AT&T billing system with 961,780 lines of code and comments through our JANUS Studio®, delivering an Application Blueprint® that enabled them to begin the next phases of their modernization more efficiently.
2. UPSKILL YOUR TEAM
Professional development does more than grow your organizational toolkit of capabilities; it also helps employee retention during a time of 3.5% unemployment.
In a fascinating 2022 learning and development study, LinkedIn found that the #1 driver of workplace culture (and so, retention) is opportunities to learn and grow. And in a time where languages like COBOL and Ada don’t even rank in the top ten searched languages, training in modern languages can also pay off for your organization. In a Microsoft-sponsored study, IDC found that IT professionals who have achieved a relevant role-based technical certification perform on average 26% better than their uncertified colleagues with the same responsibilities. Certifying your people is worth the investment.
3. UPGRADE YOUR TECHNOLOGY
If you have money left over, it’s a great time to provide your teams with technology that matches both the needs of a more mobile, more connected, and more secure world.
These can be affordable, pointed investments that can pay off with increased productivity, security, and employee satisfaction while positioning your teams to face changing needs. As you consider your options, think in terms of:
Mobility: More powerful and secure laptops and tablets
Business processes: Point of sale for retail, connected medical devices
Cloud computing: New as-a-Service applications, storage devices, and subscriptions
Cybersecurity: Assess and upgrade your current measures
Automation: Software, AI, and services to automate large, repetitive, or formerly impossible tasks
Let’s talk about that last one.
4. GET A FIRM HANDLE ON YOUR CURRENT CODE
Even if you’re not planning on modernizing code, poorly written or undocumented applications that are written in hard-to-understand languages can be a huge IT operating expense for you.
A Harris poll found that developers spend an average of 17 hours a week (42% of their time) dealing with bad code. Basic understanding of code content should be a prerequisite for any software-managing organization: know what’s there. But with millions, or tens of millions of lines of code, that can be very difficult or impossible to do manually.
That’s where TSRI DocsRev makes a powerful investment in all 365 days of 2023—and beyond.
DocsRev is automated code documentation-as-a-Service. It allows users with varying experience levels to quickly familiarize themselves with the structure and flow of the application through easily navigable diagrams, hyperlinking code, and other UML artifacts and graphics. It’s powered by the same automated tools our clients have trusted to document the world’s most critical applications since 1995. Now our technology is available to you as a simply-priced and easy-to-manage service that keeps you up to date on what’s really in your code.
In addition to giving you always-current code documentation, DocsRev apprises you on your application's current complexity, structure, control flow, data flow, similarity, and dead code. All you need to do is upload your latest code baseline to receive complete and detailed documentation.
Trusted by major organizations around the world for application maintenance and development, DocsRev frees you from uncertainty by letting you easily inspect and identify external calls, utilities, and interfaces. DocsRev shows you what your code is actually up to by automatically exposing EXEC statements your application is using such as SQL, CICS, and more.
Let’s Make Your 2023 Budget Process Go Smoothly
Throughout next year and beyond, your code will change based on your needs. To make sure you have the right views into whatever happens in your code, the DocsRev team is continually adding new views, graphs, indices, diagrams, and other features to its documentation set.
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Proven by Decades of Results. Prove It for Yourself.
For decades, TSRI clients have been discovering a dramatically faster, more accurate, and less expensive AI-based and automated modernization process. We’ve earned a place as the go-to resource for enterprise corporations, government, military, healthcare, and more. Now prove it for yourself. Find out how the proprietary TSRI modernization process delivers future-ready, cloud-based code in any modern language in a fraction of the time.
See Case Studies
Learn About Our Technology
Get Started on Your Modernization Journey Today!
How long would it take you to complete 25,000 tasks that take thirty minutes each?
Before you drag out your calculator, that’s 12,500 hours, or about 1,562 working days. Wouldn’t it be better to have it all done in under an hour? That gives you an idea of how refactoring—when done correctly—can accelerate modernization process and deliver accuracy in the range of just one error among 20,000 lines of code. That’s the kind of accuracy that’s needed for critical systems. Let’s talk about how refactoring achieves it so fast.
The refactoring phase of modernization at TSRI takes a project beyond updating the code and database to modern standards and system architecture. Sure, the planning, assessment, transformation, and integration phases of a modernization process get the mass of the work done. But more is needed. Imagine if a great painter only took a portrait to the point of getting the features in the right places. For functional equivalency, high performance, and future-readiness you need to dive into the details to get them as right as the original—and ready for future enhancements and needs.
That’s where refactoring can be hugely beneficial. If, after the transformation and integration phases you have to find and address each issue manually over hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code, you may as well add those 12,500 or more hours back in. That’s why refactoring is key. By including an iterative code scanning and refactoring phase to the modernization process, TSRI automatically and semi-automatically remedies a host of issues at scale that would make developers run for the hills, including:
"TSRI's refactoring process creates reusable components that can be applied to future projects"
And beyond those cleaning and refining functions, a well-designed refactoring process also provides forward-looking advantages. TSRI’s refactoring process improves maintainability, remediates security vulnerabilities, increases performance, and modularizes functionality. It also creates reusable components that can be applied to future projects for optimization, packaging, and redistribution.
When you’re able to reuse some or all of the outputs of automated or semi-automated refactoring, you don’t have to recreate the mechanisms for modern microservices, REST calls, and other reusable elements. They’re at your fingertips and ready for integration in modern environments or databases for future projects. It gives you the best of modularity, but customized and created specifically for your systems’ needs such as data-dictionaries, code and record consolidation, introduction of logging or comments, and more.
"It gives you the best of modularity, but customized and created specifically for your systems' needs."
One scan, one rule, and thousands of fixes
A key part of the refactoring process is scanning the newly modernized code to find issues for remediation. To do this, we use the SonarQube scanning tool. SonarQube is an open-source platform that executes continuous inspection of code quality in modernized code. It provides a detailed report of bugs, code smells, vulnerabilities, code duplications, and more. Once SonarQube has identified problems in the code the TSRI team can use the results to resolve the issues and improve code maintainability issues and security vulnerabilities.
This is where the economy of rules comes in. Once SonarQube has pointed out issues across thousands of lines of code, TSRI uses that intel to identify the types of issues that need to be addressed. When an issue appears once in an application, it often appears hundreds or thousands of times, and a single rule applied across all code can eliminate a host of individual instances.
So how did we get to those 12,500 hours we started with? We didn’t just make it up. In a TSRI project for Deutsche Bank, a single rule created based on a scan of the code fixed about 25,000 instances that issue. SonarQube estimated it would take 30 minutes to fix each instance. That means refactoring automated the remediation process and saved them about 12,500 hours of software development time. That’s a lot of Marks.
The proof is in the work. Refactoring can not only save thousands of coder hours, but a combination of code scanning and refactoring can also uplevel your modernization with:
Find out what refactoring done right can do for you, contact TSRI now
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Proven by decades of results. Prove it for yourself.
For decades, TSRI clients have been discovering a dramatically faster, more accurate, and less expensive AI-based and automated modernization process. We’ve earned a place as the go-to resource for enterprise corporations, government, military, healthcare, and more. Now prove it for yourself. Find out how the proprietary TSRI modernization process delivers future-ready, cloud-based code in any modern language in a fraction of the time.
See Case Studies
Learn About Our Technology
Get Started on Your Modernization Journey Today!
TSRI was contracted by General Dynamics (GDAIS) to automatically transform the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Submarine Weapon Control System (WCS). TSRI used its JANUS Studio® automated toolset to transform and refactor WCS Ada code to functionally equivalent C++ code.
L-3 Communications Corporation awarded a sole-source contract to TSRI for modernization of the the U.S. Army’s Variable Message Format Test Tool (VTT).
The Defense User Registration System (DURS) of the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) consisted of a UNISYS 2200 COBOL application running within the DPS form-based presentation system (DPS 1100). DURS required conversion into a Java/J2SE multi-tiered application to support DTIC modernization requirements.
How do you transform the slow pace of technological innovation within a federal agency into an opportunity for innovation and IT systems modernization? Start by taking a cue from the partnership between TSRI and GovCIO. With backing from the Federal Government’s Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) our joint teams propelled the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from an outdated twentieth-century Unisys COBOL system into modern, service-oriented Java that was performant and functionally equivalent.
TSRI worked with GovGIO on their process designed to successfully migrate the applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud. They started by defining the five key project goals and taking an inventory of system components, including intersecting platforms. Once we had identified what the unique technical challenges were and how to address each, we created testing strategies and migrated the data stores for each system. Finally, we executed an automated code conversion and refactored the legacy COBOL code.
TSRI’s partnership with GovCIO executed a rapid, holistic mainframe migration process for HUD that has improved their organizational performance while minimizing risk. On day one after the productions systems were switched over from the Unisys mainframe to the Microsoft Azure cloud, the new system supported 25,356 users and 299,715 transactions with only three user problems reported. These are the HUD systems that manage, store, and protect all the personal financial and employment-related eligibility information for FHA insured financing. Given the criticality of the data managed every day by HUD, it was important that the migration run without impact on operations. The result could be seen in the first 30 days during which the new system disbursed just over $2.7 billion dollars in HUD program funds without a single error.
Review the details of how TSRI and GovCIO successfully executed this complex modernization project in our recently published case study.
The 9 Low-Risk Steps That Led to Success
You might be surprised that HUD and other government agencies still run their IT on mainframes using COBOL (first released in the 1950’s), or MUMPS (from the 1970’s). Running on these aging platforms presents an extensive list of challenges to these agencies: data management, growing storage, collaboration, security, etc. The modernization process typically involves risk, time, and significant expense. It’s understandable that a large agency like HUD would want to select a partner they knew could deliver a low-risk, high-accuracy result.
Working together, we adhered to GovCIO’s nine-step best-practices process that resulted in modernizing systems to modern cloud architectures that can now evolve with HUD, while preventing negative impacts to their mission, day-to-day operations, and security.
For more details on the nine-step process that enabled HUD to enter the cloud age, read our latest white paper with GovCIO.
A first-person account of HUD’s modernization process with Roger Knapp – Executive Vice President and HUD Program Manager
Only a few engineers know what it feels like to lead a major government agency through an automated mainframe modernization. Roger Knapp is one of them and has been working in the field for over 30 years. As Executive VP of Engineering & Service Delivery at TSRI, Roger has unique insights on the HUD project. He sat down to share them in an interview with GovCIO as part of their Partner Spotlight.
In a short chat, he shares how the TSRI-GovCIO team overcame the challenges not only of modernizing a nationally mission-critical system at risk of obsolescence, but also how to deal with the presence of dynamic SQL data in the legacy application logic.
Get the story straight from Roger in his interview with GovCIO.
TSRI is Here for You
As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.
No change in business logic.
Reduction in overhead costs.
Continuous development during and after migration.
These are a few modernization concepts that Scott Pickett, TSRI’s Vice President of Product Operations and Service Delivery, discussed on his recent appearance on Amazon Web Services’ APN TV channel.
“TSRI allows for an ability to do automated transformation of not only your language, but your application to the cloud environment, allowing you to bring in skilled, modern technology to your legacy implementations, being able to drive down the cost point associated with ongoing operational costs, and being able to deliver new applications, new functionality, new screens, and new capabilities in that modern language,” he said in his talk.
So what does that mean, exactly?
In TSRI’s modernization of a major European bank to the cloud, that meant they modernized approximately 80,000 lines of code at 99.7% automation. In other words, only 384 of those lines of code were hand-written. That's big for a project of this size—but it's huge when you're talking about applications with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code!
For any organization, whether in commercial enterprise organizations like the banking client mentioned above, or in government agencies, modernization reduces risk.
“You're able to bring a new skill set, new experts that know Java and know CI and CD tools and apply them to your legacy application that's been modernized,” Scott said. “It literally also allows for the ability to drop tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars, off your monthly costs.”
As Scott also noted in his presentation, “we can not only transform code quickly…because there are very, very few manual changes, but it also means that you can migrate to the cloud and then be able to not have any business logic change associated with that migration.”
Maintaining business logic is a big deal when it comes to systems that measure their age in decades rather than years and the original programmers have long since moved on.
One other interesting point Scott brought up is how TSRI’s tools have enabled customers to maintain agility and competitive advantage by providing its clients with the modern, cloud-based applications they need—all while reaching back to its legacy DB2 database that supports the applications that have yet to be modernized.
Throughout the talk, Scott also pointed to how TSRI has adopted a step-wise model, which modernizes small applications or pieces of an application, tests for validity, then pushes into production before the next applications are transformed. Such a methodology allows the client to continue to develop in the legacy language, maintain a common data set, and minimizes business disruption to almost zero.
“There’s no big delay. You can continue developing the legacy and we can migrate those legacy applications while the transformations are happening and migrate them into your modern environment,” he said.
Scott also explains the steps of an automated migration in layman’s terms and how a TSRI transformation integrates cleanly into cloud services like AWS using containerization and microservices.
We of course don’t want to spoil the presentation by giving everything away, so head over to APN TV and watch for yourself to learn about how automated modernization to the cloud will save your organization time, money, and the headaches from continuing to maintain legacy systems.
TSRI is Here for You
As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.
One of the largest Japanese Car Manufactures now uses TSRI’s modernization methods to increase efficiency in their manufacturing systems. With the help of systems integrator Comture Corporation, TSRI was able to successfully transform 120k lines of COBOL to Java, in a three-week time-period, with over 99% automation levels.
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Code Modernization: Focus on ADA
Ada was designed and released from 1977 to 1983 as a high-level object-oriented language for use in real time and embedded systems. It is used extensively in systems such as air traffic management systems, banking and financial systems, communication and navigational satellites, medical equipment, and in military applications. Currently, although the Ada language has been updated, it is not as common as it once was. The ratio of Java programmers to Ada programmers is now about 20 to 1.
