Modernization’s hot.
If there’s a single takeaway from TSRI’s experience as a sponsor and exhibitor at AWS re:Invent 2021 in Las Vegas, it’s that enterprises and governments alike have their minds on software modernization. If they haven’t started the process of migrating their mainframes and legacy applications to modern architectures to the cloud, then they will be soon actively moving in that direction.
“Virtually every CIO who has a mainframe application is now looking to migrate,” said Scott Pickett, TSRI’s Vice President of Service Operations and Product Delivery, who attended the conference at the end of November.
“Mainframe modernization was the centerpiece of activity for the conference-goers we interfaced with at AWS re:Invent,” echoed Greg Tadlock, TSRI’s Vice President of Sales. While modernization comes in many different flavors—mainframes can be transformed in multiple ways (replatforming, redevelopment, or refactoring, for example.), software modernization is a niche inside the modernization industry. It’s a niche that TSRI has embraced for over two decades and doubled down on earlier this year through validation and selection as a launch partner of the AWS Mainframe Modernization competency. Mainframe application modernization is clearly a movement that has entered the mainstream. “The validation that we made the right decision to be a launch partner with AWS on their Mainframe Modernization competency was confirmed at the re:Invent conference,” Tadlock said.
As a company, TSRI has mainly focused on migrating legacy systems to modern languages and architectures, whether on-premises or on the cloud. One thing that surprised the on-site team at re:Invent were the questions about round-tripping. In essence, a round trip is a refactoring of applications originally written in software languages that most modernizations currently target, Java or C#. Both languages have been in use for two decades (or more) themselves, and the technology landscape has changed significantly during that time.
“They came to us specifically because they saw refactoring and the need to take their older Java or C# apps and get them refactored to targeted cloud services, microservices, and containers,” said Kory Caze, TSRI’s Lead Account Executive. It’s a service TSRI has begun to offer, and will certainly become a focus area in the coming year.
The refactoring or transformation of nearly any legacy language to modern languages is certainly one the core values TSRI offers to the modernization market. The capability to modernize more than standard IBM COBOL applications can be useful for, say, an airline that needs to modernize their FORTRAN applications—an opportunity that actually presented itself at the conference this year.
“There are so many software languages and technologies out there, that you can't have a one-size-fits-all solution for,” Kory said. In fact, TSRI’s Director of Business Development, René Wagner, had three different inquiries about doing a transformation from MUMPS, a relatively obscure mainframe language originally developed for healthcare operations—all within 10 minutes of each other! “It's like the most random language,” said René.
Knowing that several companies have joined AWS’s Mainframe Modernization competency is reassuring to smaller companies like TSRI. They have a significant role to play in bringing major corporations and public sector agencies to the cloud quickly and efficiently, according to René.
“If you went over to the modernization area [at re:Invent] and you asked Amazon, ‘Who do you use to transform your systems to modernize the mainframe?’” René said, “their answer was, ‘Oh, we have an ecosystem of partners that we utilize to get this work done.’”
Everyone on the TSRI team saw live, in action, that modernization will be important over the next few years. Migration to the cloud, they all said, is not a matter of if, but when.
“That was kind of the feeling that I got,” René said. “Modernization is happening, and these people have bled enough on what they currently have.”
While TSRI has begun to focus more of its efforts on cloud migrations, with AWS as a leading platform, the re:Invent conference opened the company’s eyes to plenty of opportunities that the company’s leadership might not have considered even a year or two ago. Being on the floor as a first-time sponsor and having the ability to demonstrate what the company can do, through Application Blueprint® demonstrations, or walking booth visitors through case studies, has opened a lot of doors for the TSRI team.
“The AWS mainframe migration announcement validates the tools, capabilities, and shift that TSRI has undergone, as well as in the industry,” said Scott Pickett, TSRI’s Vice President of Service Operations and Product Delivery.
Next year should be even more interesting.
If you were unable attend AWS re:Invent 2021, you can still access the materials TSRI shared that show what we can do to help your organization modernize to the AWS cloud. Download this information to get started!
Case Study: Modernizing a Critical ILS-S U.S. Air Force System for AWS
TSRI’s approach to modernizing mainframe technology for AWS
Checklist: Preparing for Cloud Modernization
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.
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:
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.
Join the TSRI team as we sponsor and exhibit at Amazon Web Services’ 10th annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas!
AWS re:Invent | Nov 29. – Dec. 3, 2021 | Las Vegas, NV | Visit TSRI at Booth #730!
AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. The in-person event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to 1,500+ technical sessions, the Expo, after-hours events, and so much more.
The event is ideal for developers and engineers, system administrators, systems architects, IT executives, and technical decision-makers.
TSRI at re:Invent – Rapid, Low-risk Mainframe Modernization for AWS Deployment
Stop by our booth #730 or schedule a meeting with us at re:Invent!
As a vetted, validated, and verified AWS Mainframe Migration Competency partner, TSRI provides rapid, low-risk software modernization for deployment on AWS.
TSRI’s re:Invent team will include our VP of Product Development and Service Delivery, Scott Pickett. Scott has led the TSRI team through dozens of successful modernization projects and will be on-hand to discuss the technical details of TSRI’s modernization solution and to answer questions about how TSRI transforms numerous legacy languages and operates within different existing and target architecture environments.
Our business development team 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, and many other industries.
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.
When you use automation to modernize applications that you’ve been running for years, there should be no functional change between the legacy code you’ve migrated from and the target language you’ve transformed to. That dramatically simplifies testing.
As Scott Pickett explains in the latest episode of our “Migrating Your Mainframe to the Cloud” video series, you can create quick test scripts to confirm that the business logic has stayed exactly the same. From there, knowing that the automated modernization has created that like-for-like codebase in the new target language means that you simply need to confirm that the data baselines you set are in sync and you’re off to the races!
As Scott does note, TSRI’s solution does inject telemetry into the modernization so you will have logs to help with those code and data comparisons, which makes the full testing process that much simpler.
Originally aired live on May 18, 2021.
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”
Video 5: “Modernizing Using Layered Architectures”
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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.
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.
As Scott notes in this video, the latest in our Modernizing for the Future series for undertaking a cloud modernization, “One of the benefits associated with using an automated technology is that none of it is done by hand.” In this video Scott introduces the idea of automation when it comes to modernization and how taking this avenue will preserve the functionality and logic of the legacy applications. The benefit is that the application will operate exactly the same way it did previously, but with capabilities to expand into a more tiered approach so the application can take advantage of the best the cloud has to offer.
Originally aired live on May 18, 2021.
Additionally, having the automated transformation preserve the functionality means once organizations are ready to put the cloud applications into production, the data layer remains consistent so this can be done gradually with very little downtime in the production environments. That minimal business disruption greatly reduces the risk of data loss and technical failures. And from there, automated and semi-automated refactoring can begin to improve the quality and functionality of the application—all in a cloud environment.
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
As always, TSRI can help answer any questions you may have about modernization, automation, and making sure your systems are ready to deploy in modern computing environments.
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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.
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:
What are the Challenges?
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
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Get started on your modernization journey today!
In our latest video from our Modernizing for the Future series for undertaking a cloud modernization, Scott Pickett discusses some of the decisions organizations need to consider when choosing a target language and the right cloud vendor. Some of these considerations include time-to-market and compatibility based upon your existing architecture. Scott talks through some of the ways you can make the decision that best fits your organization's needs as well as pitfalls to watch for.
Originally aired live on May 18, 2021.
Be sure to view the first two videos in this series as well.
As always, TSRI can help answer any questions you may have about modernization, automation, and making sure your systems are ready to deploy in modern computing environments.
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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.
Highlights on “Setting Project Scope” and “Setting Up Development Sandboxes”
TSRI is thrilled to present highlights from Modernizing for the Future, our cloud webinar featuring Scott Pickett, our Vice President of Product Development and Service Delivery. In these first two segments, Scott helps your organization get the mainframe modernization process started.
The first segment, “Setting Project Scope,” helps your organization understand their existing baselines, setting realistic expectations and accomplishments for your migration, and planning your target environment.
In this second segment, “Setting Up Development Sandboxes,” Scott discusses your organization’s development sandbox and why setting up an experimental environment will be critical to the success of your automated modernization. Your sandbox will help validate your target environment as well as understand any complexities in languages, architectures, or databases.
As always, TSRI can help answer any questions you may have about automated modernization, and making sure your systems are ready to deploy in modern computing environments.
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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.
Learn tips to navigate the process in this presentation by TSRI’s VP of Product Development and Service Delivery, Scott Pickett.
Originally aired live on May 18, 2021.
Modernizing for the Future: Effectively Leveraging Today’s Modernization Solutions for the Cloud
Modernization efforts today that target cloud technologies require an understanding of the new environment up-front in the process. With a landscape of constantly evolving technology options, organizations looking to modernize their code, databases and UI, and move to the cloud are confronted with many considerations. The options are daunting, and the path to successful execution is not always clear.
Key Takeaways:
Gain important insights to successfully move beyond language modernization and support best practices for deployment in a cloud environment.
Learn about common benefits, challenges, and pitfalls in cloud migration and modernization.
Dive into the specifics associated with modernizing COBOL programs and the tools, services, and tech stacks required to support them in a modern 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.
