Originally developed by Denmark-based KMD in 2001 as a mainframe software application, the e-Boks system became more difficult and costly to maintain over time. The original platform also lacked the agility to expand to additional countries at scale and was not agile enough to expeditiously react to business changes. TSRI and KMD were able to modernize the e-Boks application from its original IBM PL/1 legacy code in a monolithic architecture to a modern, multi-tier application in a modern computing environment, running .NET, with no impact on the business and end-user experience. As a result, e-Boks has the potential to save more than 50-60 percent per year in operations and maintenance costs.
Customer: KMD and The Government of Denmark
Source & Target Language: PL/1 & JCL to C#
Lines of Code: 974,201 (781,893 - PL/1 and 192,308 - JCL)
Duration: 6 Months
Services: Transformation Blueprint®, Automated Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Integration and Testing Support
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.
Kirkland, WA. (March 12, 2010) – One of the best kept secrets in Washington DC is that our nation’s veterans already have a comprehensive electronic health care record (EHR) that for decades has supported delivery of quality health care at more than a 160 VHA hospitals around the world. That extraordinary system is VistA, the Veteran Information System Technical Architecture. Written in MUMPS, VistA serves as the vital backbone of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Electronic Health Care Record System (EHRS) that manages medical record data and delivers medical informatics to the veteran’s bedside while tracking and managing 100% of veteran’s health care electronically throughout his journey through the VHA medical care system.
Ironically, VistA like many systems that are highly successful, is now threatened with self-extinction due to its need for continuous growth and the inability of MUMPS, the language it is written in, to sustain its continued evolution. VistA suffers from a form of software arthritis common among many legacy systems. Due to its age, size and complexity VistA is brittle, inflexible and resistant to change, and its maintenance costs have gone through the roof, compromising the VHA’s ability to grow and evolve Vista as the foundation for a 21st century medical delivery system for its veterans.
In 2005 the VHA estimated automated modernization of VistA could save the VHA upwards of $3 Billion compared to redevelopment, or manual replacement. With the announcement today by The Software Revolution, Inc (TSRI), (the world-leading supplier of architecture driven modernization (ADM-based) solutions), of its open-source Transformation Blueprint® for OpenVistA, TSRI has made a huge start on this daunting challenge. For those who might care to understand, the OpenVistA Transformation Blueprint® is a major step towards achievement of the VHA's goal of modernizing its Electronic Healthcare Record system for its veterans.
TSRI’s OpenVistA®Transformation Blueprint® provides the complete target Java code and UML design for the transformation of all 2.1 Million lines of OpenVistA® and 120,000+ lines of Fileman MUMPS code. The OpenVistA®Transformation Blueprint® is far more than a mere language translation. It is a massive multi-million page (300GB) web-based software design and architecture document consisting of navigable hypertext of the 'As-Is' MUMPS and 'To-Be Java' hyperlinked to hundreds of thousands of State Machine Graphs, Cause-Effect Graphs, State-Transition Tables, Control Flow Graphs, Data-Flow Graphs, Structure Charts, Data Element Tables, Class Diagrams expressed as scalable graphical diagrams that richly document all of the MUMPS and target Java/J2EE code. The Transformation Blueprint® is both an application portfolio as well as a complete architectural roadmap towards a modernized OpenVistA® and Fileman. Every statement of MUMPS in OpenVistA® is shown side-by-side with its transformation into Java/ J2EE along with an extensive array of software property-oriented metric indices (e.g. fan-in, fan-out, complexity, redundancy, dead code, etc) for navigation to the code measured by the property.
To learn more about TSRI’s transformation of OpenVistA® and the company’s plans for evolving OpenVistA® towards a modernized universal EHR system of the future, read the Chapter 12 casestudy: Veterans Health Administration’s VistA MUMPS Modernization Pilot in William Ulrich and Philip Newcomb’s new book Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization CaseStudies, just published by Morgan Kaufmann, February 2010 as part of the Object Management Group (OMG) OMG Series.
Kirkland, WA. (February 22, 2010) – New Book Release
Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization Casestudies
By William M. Ulrich and Philip H. Newcomb
Published by Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 978-0-12-374913-0
Copyright Feb 2010
$59.95 USD €43.95 EUR £29.99 GBP www.informationsystemstransformation.com
For more information about TSRI contact:
TSRI
Greg Tadlock
Vice President of Sales
Phone: (425) 284-2770
Fax: (425) 284-2785 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
EDS awarded a sole-source contract to The Software Revolution, Inc. (TSRI) for a Proof-of-Principle project to demonstrate an automated transformation, documentation, and refactoring capability for the PL/1 source language.
Customer: Electronic Data Systems
Source & Target Language: PL/1 to Java
Lines of Code: 50,000
Duration: 2 Months
Services: Code Transformation, System Integration and Test Support, Automated Refactoring, and Export of the Transformed & Refactored Code to the EDS Code Generator in XMI Format