Leveraging Legacy System Dollars for E-Business

• Authors: Len Erlikh
• Venue: IT Professional
• Year: 2000

Although many firms have rapidly and enthusiastically adopted distributed architectures, many more are stuck with mainframe based mission-critical systems that continue to isolate them from their partner, supplier, and customer systems. Most companies want to transform their applications to meet new business demands, but because legacy systems tend to be unwieldy, monolithic, and inflexible, many firms regard modernization as somewhere between improbable and impossible. Reeling from the Y2K debacle and saddled with years of application backlog, the most these companies can hope for is to keep their legacy system alive. And keeping it alive is getting more expensive. It is also becoming harder to find qualified personnel to do the maintenance. All of this makes it difficult to add new functionality and keep up with business requirements. The ideal solution is to transform legacy systems to newer, more productive platforms so that companies can exploit faster and cheaper development technologies, like Java and XML (Extensible Markup Language). The focus then shifts to functionality, not the infrastructure, which means a company can respond more quickly to its changing business requirements and technology enhancements. RescueWare, legacy transformation software from Relativity Technologies, breaks business knowledge into stand-alone pieces, or e-components. The e-components are basically collections of objects that perform specific business services, have clearly defined application program interfaces (APIs), and are accessible through modern industry-standard protocols