Displaying items by tag: mainframe

Using money from the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) under the Modernizing Government Technology Act disbursed by the General Services Administration (GSA) of the U.S. government, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sought to modernize several of its remaining critical systems on a legacy Unisys mainframe written in COBOL with a flat-file DMS-II database.

Customer: Department of Housing and Urban Development and Salient CRGT Source & Target Language: Unisys COBOL to Java Lines of Code: 1.3 Million Duration:  8 Months Services: Automated Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Integration and Testing Support, Enginerring Support, Software Maintenance Agreement, Transformation Blueprint®, Application "As-Is" Blueprint®,

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. 

Downtime, lack of agility, and vendor lock may keep organizations from modernizing their aging legacy applications, but plenty of other roadblocks, whether technical or psychological, can also stand in the way from an organization from undertaking a high-stakes modernization effort. For example:

• One TSRI defense client had been using the same COBOL mainframe applications for nearly 50 years. The agency expected that migrating away from this mission-critical system would require downtime that could have led to data loss, mission interruptions, and catastrophic security failures.
   
• Another client, a large European bank, used mainframe applications that could have served them well for another decade or longer. However, upstart digital competitors were running circles around this financial powerhouse. They needed more agility.
   
• Another defense client wanted to migrate its applications to Amazon Web Services but worried about limited options. Their mainframe used a proprietary architecture and applications, and the agency was locked into long-term contracts that would have prevented them from undergoing a transformation. This agency needed assurances a transformation could be done—and done properly.

Understanding and Overcoming the Misconceptions and Fears

If you’re a change maker in your organization — whether on the business or IT side — you probably see the need to modernize your applications. Throughout our 26 years of modernizing critical applications, we have found that many perceived obstacles are actually misconceptions, fears, uncertainties, or doubts that arise due to a lack of information.

Here are the most common misconceptions and obstacles, and how we help our clients get around them:

Obstacle 1: “It Will Cost Too Much!”
Cost almost always rises to the top of the list. From an OpEx perspective, once a modernized system goes into production, your organization can achieve savings quickly and dramatically. One client reduced its IT operations costs from over $1 million to tens of thousands of dollars—per month. While not every transformation will yield remarkable savings like that, your organization will recoup its modernization costs quickly.

In addition, because an automated transformation is much less likely to produce the inevitable errors produced by humans—we are, after all, only human—that means far lower instances of cost overruns.

Obstacle 2: System Downtime
Many organizations see time to market and system downtime as major concerns. Undertaking an automated modernization will be the fastest, most reliable alternative nearly all the time. As opposed to rewriting all or most of the code in the target language by hand, a fully automated transformation can take months—if not years—off the timeframe to bring the modernized application into production. Such automated modernizations also can give you the option to run your applications in the legacy and modernized environments side by side for testing, and then flip the switch to put the new environment into production with very little, if any, downtime—which means no disruption to the business.

Obstacle 3: “If it Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix it!”
Organizations may also face the dilemma of making change if there isn’t a need to change. Such attitudes can be embedded into an organization’s culture, and convincing top management to commit to large expenditures where much of the beauty lies under the hood can be a heavy lift. However, external issues may force a modernization—oftentimes when it’s too late.

Most enterprise companies and government agencies running mainframes historically had armies of programmers that maintained their systems. As the decades rolled by, however, most of those programmers retired from the workforce while computer science programs shifted to educating on modern, object-oriented languages like C# or Java. As one client discovered for PL/1, a much more obscure mainframe language, the agency that ran the application found only a single person in the entire country capable of supporting the application. That was clearly not a sustainable solution.

Even more challenging, the language or platform itself may have survived past its reasonable lifespan. TSRI has modernized applications originally housed on mainframes built by Wang. The company ceased to exist in the 1990s and its subsequent iterations no longer supported a version of COBOL proprietary to its systems. At that point, modernization wasn’t a luxury—it was a necessity.

Obstacle 4: The Knowledge Gap
Finally, when a legacy system has been in service for 40, 50, or even 60 years, the original developers will doubtfully still be a part of the organization. Institutional knowledge can be passed down, but most IT leaders won’t have a clear view of what their systems can do. The transformation engine that takes on an automated modernization can also generate documentation that provides a detailed blueprint of an application today and how it will function in the modern target language. Those insights will help the engineers who maintain the application understand how a modernization can achieve their business goals.

Face the Fear and Reap Big Rewards!

Undertaking a drastic change like modernizing an application comes with risks and likely some trepidation, but it also creates opportunities that might never have been possible by continuing to maintain a legacy system. Completion of a successful transformation will not only save your organization money and give you better access to development resources, it will make your organization more agile and provide you with modern tools to better serve your end users.

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.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get Started on your Modernization Journey Today!

One huge benefit to an automated modernization is the migration from a monolithic architecture to a multi-tier architecture. The multi-tier, or layered, architecture separates the data layer from the logic layer, and also makes the presentation layer—what the end user sees and interacts with—independent of the other two. In this video segment, Scott Pickett discusses how this modern-day style of architecture allows developers to extend the functionality of an application without affecting the data or behavior of an application. Even more important, however, he explains how a modernized application can continue to refer back to legacy databases when organizations migrate to their target environment in smaller steps rather than committing all at once.

Be sure to view our other videos in this series:

Videos 1 & 2: “Setting Project Scope” and “Setting Up Development Sandboxes”

Video 3: Selecting Cloud Vendors and Your Target Language

Video 4: Using Automation to Quickly and Accurately Move to a Multi-Tier Environment

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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.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get started on your modernization journey today!

Using automation to modernize mainframe applications will bring a codebase to today’s common coding standards and architectures. But in many cases, modernization to an application’s functional equivalent isn’t always enough. Organizations can do more to make their modern code more efficient and readable. By building refactoring phases into their modernization projects, organizations can eliminate the Pandora’s box of dead or non-functional code that many developers don’t want to open, especially if it contains elements that just don’t work.

Using TSRI’s automated refactoring engine, remediation was complete in an hour.

What is Refactoring and How is it Used?

Refactoring, by definition, is an iterative process that automatically identifies and remediates pattern-based issues throughout a modernized application’s codebase. For example, unreferenced variables or unnecessary redundant snippets could exist throughout the application. This scan, known as dead/redundant code refactoring, will find repetitions of any of this unusable code to flag, then remove it from the codebase. One of TSRI’s current projects found 25,000 instances of a similar issue that would have required 15 minutes of manual remediation per instance—not including the inevitable introduction of human error that would require further remediation. The number of development hours would take more than a year for a single developer to complete.

Using TSRI’s automated refactoring engine, however, remediation was complete in an hour.

Calling refactoring its own post-modernization phase is, in some ways, misleading. Refactoring typically occurs all the way through an automated mainframe transformation. As an example, in a typical COBOL or PL/1 mainframe modernization, TSRI would refactor the code from a monolithic application to a multi-tier application, with Java or C# handling back-end logic, a relational database layer through a Database Access Object (DAO) layer, and the user interface (screens) modernized in a web-based format. Believe it or not, many legacy applications still run on 3270 green-screens or other terminals, like in the graphic below.

Once the automated modernization of the legacy application is complete, the application has become a functionally equivalent, like-for-like system. However, any deprecated code, functions that may have never worked as planned, or routines that were written but never implemented will still exist. A process written in perhaps 1981—or even 1961—may have taken far more code to execute than a simple microservice could handle today.

Situations like this are where refactoring becomes indispensable.

Where to begin?

Before a formal refactoring process can begin, it’s important to understand your goals and objectives, such as performance, quality, cybersecurity, and maintainability. This will typically mean multiple workshops to define which areas of the modernized codebase need attention and the best candidates for refactoring, based upon the defined goals. These refactorings will either be semi-automated (fully automated with some human input) or custom written (based upon feedback from code scanners or subject-matter experts.)

The refactoring workshops can reveal many different candidates for refactoring:

• Maintainability: By removing or remediating bugs, dead or orphaned code, or any other anomalies the codebase can be reduced by as much as one third while pointing developers in the direction of any bugs in need of remediation.
•  
• Readability: Renaming obscure functions or variables for a modern developer to fit within naming conventions that are both understandable and within the context of the code’s functionality.
•  
• Security: Third-party tools such as Fortify and CAST can be utilized to find vulnerabilities, but once found they need to be remediated through creation of refactoring rules.
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• Performance: Adding reusable microservices or RESTful endpoints to connect to other applications in the cloud can greatly improve the efficiency of the application, as can functionality that enables multiple services to run in parallel rather than sequentially.

What are the Challenges?

• Challenge 1: One reason refactoring must be an iterative process is that some functionality can change with each pass. Occasionally, those changes will introduce bugs to the application. However, each automated iteration will go though regression testing, then refactored again to remediate those bugs prior to the application returning to a production environment.
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• Challenge 2: The legacy architecture itself may pose challenges. On a mainframe, if a COBOL application needs to access data, it will call on the entire database and cycle through until it finds the records it needs. Within a mainframe architecture this can be done quickly. But if a cloud-based application needs to call a single data record out of millions or billions from halfway across the world (on cloud servers), the round trip of checking each record becomes far less efficient—and, in turn, slower. By refactoring the database, the calls can go directly to the relevant records and ignore everything else that exists in the database.
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• Challenge 3: Not every modernization and refactoring exercise meets an organization’s quality requirements. For example, the codebase for a platform that runs military defense systems is not just complex, it’s mission critical. Armed forces will set a minimum quality standard that any transformation must meet. Oftentimes these standards can only be achieved through refactoring. A third-party tool like SonarQube in conjunction with an automated toolset like TSRI’s JANUS Studio^® can be utilized to discover and point to solutions for refactoring to reach and exceed the required quality gate.
•  

In conclusion, while an automated modernization will quickly and accurately transform legacy mainframe applications to a modern, functionally equivalent, cloud-based or hybrid architecture, refactoring will make the application durable and reliable into the future.

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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.

See Case Studies
Learn About Our Technology
Get started on your modernization journey today!

Is modernizing your software applications to the cloud a topic of discussion in your organization? Though a move to the cloud may not be the immediate next step in your organization’s IT strategy, it is likely that such a migration will eventually be critical to long-term success. If you’re contemplating (or already planning on) a move to the cloud and need to modernize your applications, then you need to be prepared.

With hundreds of large-scale modernizations under our belt, the TSRI team has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. While no modernization effort is without its bumps, there are things you can do to pave an easier path. We’ve developed a checklist to give you a head start on your modernization journey to ensure success from the beginning!

Technical

Discovery on your existing mainframe 

Conduct a technical assessment to help understand your existing systems to set a baseline for a transformation.

CODEBASE
 

Existing languages (primary sub-languages)

Lines of code and comments

Readability and completeness of application documentation

Blackbox libraries

DATABASES
 

Database platform(s) & versions(s)

Database Metrics (Size, Tables, Columns, etc.)

Database type(s), e.g., flat file, relational, mid-range, etc.

Connection nodes to application codebase & other services

SCREEN (user interface)

    
Types (graphical or text-based)

Interoperability between applications

Usability

Feature assessment

• SERVICES

    
Licensing agreements

Tool feasibility

Assessment of needs

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• OTHER METRICS

    
MIPS consumption

Transactions & transaction volumes

Third-party tools & services

Customized tools

Undocumented tools (may be discoverable via an application blueprint process)

Physical Mainframe Review

Examines system architecture, technical services in use, and analysis of both internal and external services/applications. We can use this information to map your system to your desired target services and architecture.

Existing architecture survey

Architecture diagram evaluation

External applications assessment

Utilities and services assessment

Services overlap within the full application portfolio

Performance, quality, and security baselines and metrics

SMEs/Personnel

While the technical review is important, it’s also useful to have an understanding of who on the team is able to maintain and develop on your existing systems. The logic and technical requirements may be different once you’ve established your target architecture.

Survey of staffing (existing and future)

Assessment of team’s working knowledge of applications

Talent assessment within market

As you gather this information, TSRI uses its tools to assess the code, find any code modules/segments within applications that are no longer in use, and generate code-level documentation through a blueprint preview of the current codebase and what a future, modernized codebase might look like. We will then work with you to establish business requirements. Note that while many of these tasks individually take a short time, depending upon the number of applications and the size of your application portfolio, an end-to-end engagement can range anywhere from 1-2 years if your systems have fewer than 10 million lines of code to transform to 4-5 years for much larger portfolios and codebases.

Business

Business case development and financial discovery

Once you have completed a technical analysis and your IT leaders understand your existing systems, it is time to establish your organization’s business cases to modernize your applications and support a modern environment.

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• NEEDS ASSESSMENT

    
Timeframe for project phases and project completion

Market and internal demands

Then vs. now: evolution of your customer and business needs

Modern workflows and accessibility

Security posture

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• • CURRENT FINANCIAL STATE

    
Total cost of mainframe and application ownership

Mainframe operating expenses

Capital expenditures

Amortized costs

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• • INTANGIBLE COSTS BEYOND PRICE

    
Market agility

Business requirements agility

Availability of developers that support legacy systems

Download and print your own modernization checklist

While most businesses that rely upon mainframes will need to modernize in one way or another, every organization’s needs will be different. Base your organization’s decisions not just on the flashiest current technologies, but on the methodologies and technologies that will work best for your company today and into the future. TSRI can work with you to complete this checklist assessment to start you on the path of a fully automated mainframe modernization. Contact us now to begin!

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.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get started on your modernization journey today!

KIRKLAND, Wash., April 05, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Software Revolution Inc. (TSRI) announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Mainframe Migration Competency status. This designation recognizes that TSRI has proven solutions, practices, and customer success in migrating both mainframe applications and data to AWS.  

Recognizing the complexity of a mainframe migration, AWS customers seek proven methodologies, tools, and best practices to empower successful migrations. The AWS Partner Network (APN) plays a critical role in these efforts by providing access to mature technology products and services for customers’ mainframe migrations from AWS Partners with proven solutions and expertise.  

AWS launched the AWS Mainframe Migration Competency to help customers confidently identify and engage AWS Partners who specialize in mainframe migration. These AWS Partners are vetted, validated, and verified against a high bar to achieve the AWS Mainframe Migration Competency. The high bar validates and verifies that AWS Partners with AWS Mainframe Migration Competency status offer mature solutions and practices and repeatable mainframe migration success.  

Achieving the AWS Mainframe Migration Competency status differentiates TSRI as an AWS Partner with a track record of success and deep domain expertise in mainframe workloads migration. 

“With this announcement, AWS puts a stake in the ground that modernization is vital to the health and security of governments and companies worldwide. The AWS Competency program encourages higher standards and better access for organizations looking to usefully leverage cloud technologies for their clients,” said Nicolas Newcomb, President of TSRI. “TSRI is honored to achieve AWS Mainframe Migration Competency status. We look forward to supporting successful modernization journeys for more organizations than ever before.”

TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption. Their model-driven methods use 99.9X% automation to modernize and migrate mainframe applications, databases, and user interfaces into multi-tier, cloud-enabled architectures. TSRI’s iterative refactoring process repairs dead code and eliminates dead ends while their automated documentation engine enables today’s developers to more completely understand their system architectures.

“TSRI differentiates itself through experience and the speed and accuracy with which they transform legacy code,” said Sumeet Shrivastava, CEO of TSRI’s integration partner Array Information Technology. “Having a reliable partner like TSRI allows the Array team to do what we do best – develop upon the foundation of the transformed code toward wider reaching client objectives.”

Systems integrator NTT DATA partnered with TSRI to modernize a 50-year-old logistics system for the U.S. Air Force. “The United States Air Force required system modernization with no loss in functionality, no loss of performance, and adherence to price and schedule,” said Paul Saladna, Associate Director and Enterprise Architect at NTT DATA. “Throughout the project, TSRI proved to be an optimal partner who delivered on-time, on-budget, and to spec. They made the modernization process easy from start to finish.” 

View the case study to learn more about how the U.S. Air Force modernized their technology with TSRI for AWS deployment.

“Now more than ever, businesses are looking to migrate and modernize their mainframes with AWS. To help customers make the right choices when finding the most qualified AWS Partner for the job, we’ve created the new AWS Mainframe Migration Competency for customers to easily identify expert AWS Partners with repeatable mainframe migration success,”  said Bill Platt, General Manager, Migration Services, AWS. “These AWS Partners are vetted by AWS for their mature solutions with proven customer migration success, and we are excited to include TSRI in the launch of the new AWS Mainframe Migration Competency. We look forward to helping more customers modernize mainframes together and continuing to offer cost-effective, agile, and innovative solutions.”

Learn more about TSRI’s approach to modernizing mainframe technology for AWS.

AWS is enabling scalable flexible and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

For more information about TSRI’s technologies and the benefits of cloud migration, or to begin your organization’s modernization journey, visit www.tsri.com. 

About TSRI 

TSRI – Software Modernization Assured 

As a leading provider of fully automated 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. 

View TSRI’s software transformation case studies, or contact us to start your modernization journey today.

Contact:
Greg Tadlock 
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
+1 (425) 284-2782

When companies and governments need to migrate their mission-critical applications to the cloud, they will need a partner to make that transformation as smooth and efficient as possible. And when it comes to modernization, a highly automated process will get them cloud-ready quickly and accurately. TSRI is here to help organizations begin their modernization journey, and we are honored to be named as a Validated Partner in Amazon Web Services’ new Mainframe Migration Competency!

The AWS Competency Program is designed to identify, validate, and promote AWS Partners with demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success.
The Competency designation helps AWS Partners differentiate their business to customers by showcasing their products and services in specialized areas across industries, use cases, and workloads. AWS Partners are vetted, validated, and verified against a high bar to achieve the AWS Competency designation.

TSRI joins an elite group of integrators and technical specialists in this competency. With more than 25 years of experience and leadership in modernization across multiple platforms and languages, we are perfectly positioned to help organizations with legacy architectures migrate to the cutting edge.

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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.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get started on your modernization journey today!

At AWS re:Invent 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled plans for a new “Mainframe Migration Competency” and announced that TSRI has been identified as a launch partner! AWS recognized that TSRI’s solution — which provides near-100% automation and cloud-specific refactoring — are a huge benefit for organizations seeking reliable, low-risk, and rapid migration to the cloud. Furthermore, TSRI’s proven track record, which includes hundreds of successful modernization projects over more than 25 years, meant that TSRI would be a reliable and knowledgeable technology partner for AWS customers.

From AWS:

“Recognizing the complexity of a mainframe migration, our customers seek proven methodologies, tools, and best practices to empower successful migrations. The AWS Partner Network (APN) plays a critical role in these efforts by providing proven technology products and services for customers’ mainframe migrations.”

TSRI’s model-based solution transforms even very large (tens of millions of lines of code) legacy systems written in languages like COBOL, Fortran, PowerBuilder, Ada, MUMPS, VB6, and more than 30 other languages, into modern applications in cloud-native target architectures. The output is a modern multi-tier application that takes advantage of cloud utilities and scalability.

Now is the time to modernize for the cloud. According to AWS, “more than 70 percent of the Fortune 500 companies still run business-critical applications on mainframes, and many companies and institutions still possess legacy mainframes in their data centers. As a result of constantly evolving customer needs, the demand for modernization has accelerated as companies require increased agility to meet those needs.

“Due to the slow development cycle of mainframes, more companies are migrating to the cloud to enable rapid development and innovation. Furthermore, as mainframe subject matter experts retire and leave the workforce, these companies face an increasing skills gap.

“Coupled with high upgrade and development costs and expensive usage fees, CIOs with mainframes they must maintain are well aware of the business risks to their enterprise. As a result, a growing number of companies are looking to modernize and migrate their mainframe workloads to Amazon Web Services. These migrations enable companies to realize business benefits like an average 70 percent savings in IT infrastructure costs.”

See the AWS blog for more.

We’re excited to start the modernization journey with any organization looking to get off their mainframe and on to AWS! Learn more about how TSRI can help you transform your technology quickly and seamlessly, ensuring you and your application users can make the most of what cloud technologies have to offer.

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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.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get started on your modernization journey today!

Mainframes are big. Mainframes are powerful. Mainframes continue to run an enormous number of critical applications. Even as today’s enterprise infrastructures gravitate toward the cloud and newer languages, according to Allied Market Research, the market for mainframes will continue to grow through at least 2025 and legacy languages such as COBOL are still in wide use. The actual amount of processing performed by mainframes continues to grow steadily each year as a result of increasing demands, more users, and new applications reliant upon data stored on mainframes.

Modernize Now, Plan for the Future

While the capacity and processing power of a mainframe remains attractive to enterprise companies and governments alike, there are drawbacks: when it comes to agility, mainframes cannot quickly adjust to the needs of a business. They cannot quickly scale to meet extraordinary events. It’s difficult to integrate business-intelligence tools for non-engineers to easily access the data they need. Mainframes often don’t have the automated security tools to mitigate a security breach before it causes extensive damage.

At the same time, as each year passes, more experts that can maintain the older, legacy languages like COBOL and PL/1 are retiring. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the availability of programmers reached crisis proportions when overtaxed unemployment systems in some U.S. states couldn’t keep up with demand. Most younger software engineers train and work in newer, evolving languages that support web technologies and the cloud.

Still, even as many of these enterprise organizations are strongly considering moving operations and processes to the cloud, such migrations can take years, and they may not abandon their mainframes entirely. But they still need the agility, access, and security of a modern system to remain competitive.

So, what can these organizations do? They can modernize.

A modernization effort is often targeted not only at the mainframe itself, but at older language programs that run these massive machines. These programs, often written in now-archaic languages without consideration for internet connectivity or cloud computing, often need to change to meet the organization’s current needs for accessibility, customer experience, and security compliance. These requirements are universal to modernization efforts of any kind, but not all forms of modernization are adept at meeting all the requirements. The modernization strategy your organization selects needs to consider the resources you have available, your timelines, and what your ideal outcome looks like.

Choosing a Modernization Strategy

Mainframe modernization does not have to mean eliminating the mainframe. Organizations can utilize a number of different modernization strategies that meet different demands at varying cost and risk levels. Some possibilities include:

1. Gradual integration: On an as-needed basis, organizations can use automation to modernize older applications through incremental improvement and build new applications on the mainframe that fit into a state-of-the-art computing environment.
2. Retire, Retain, Replace, Rehost or Re-envision: An organization will assess legacy applications and systems on an individual basis and decide what should be retained, what can be rewritten, and what should be replaced with a new, modern application that can be hosted in a new environment such as the cloud.
3. Lift and shift: Rebuild current mainframe applications on a new platform, then integrate the with mainframe applications and data sources across platforms.
4. Automated Transformation:  A dedicated team assesses existing applications created in common languages such as COBOL or Fortran, or even less-common languages like PL/1 and MUMPS, then uses automated processes to translate the legacy application to the desired modern language (e.g., Java is a very common target). Organizations can then migrate to an upgraded mainframe or rehost them in the cloud. At the same time, a wider range of programmers can work with the modernized applications and more easily incorporate them into new databases and services.

Each approach varies depending upon business requirements, budget, and modernization schedule. Regardless, before beginning any process, an organization’s business and technical teams need to define their objectives and scope.

Gain Security & Competitive Advantage

Whether your organization is ready to move out of a mainframe environment or not, modernized code provides the security and peace of mind that your critical applications can be maintained and evolved as needed to support the business over time. As the Covid crisis and associated economic pressures have forced businesses of every size to accelerate modernizing their legacy systems, organization leaders have realized they can no longer wait to maintain their security and competitive advantage.

While some organizations may choose to do a wholesale migration, most companies and government agencies will opt to modernize using a more gradual approach. Either way – and whether an organization stays on their mainframe, moves to the cloud, or develops a hybrid solution – a modernization will ensure they can have the digital and human resources to sustain their operations far into the future.

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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.

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