Survey Says: Legacy Apps to Get Modernized

Published: July 18, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In many ways, legacy applications and the platforms they run on present similar issues to the IT department--almost regardless of the legacy platform itself. Legacy applications have value and are, by their very nature, unique to each company. After years of experience in rehosting, recoding, outsourcing, and offshoring applications, many IT shops are content to leave their legacy applications alone and put another layer or two of software on top of them to make their functionality accessible in new ways.

This is what is generally meant by the term legacy application modernization, and according to a survey of mostly mainframe shops (but also users of other legacy platforms) done by German mainframe database and XML middleware software supplier Software AG, shops with legacy systems are more interested in modernizing than they are in unplugging and replacing their legacy systems. This is, of course, great news for customers who do not want to manage new systems and for vendors who want to keep selling the same systems into data centers.

Software AG did a survey of its customer base and got responses from 247 people representing 183 unique companies and government agencies. About 71 percent of those who responded to the survey had mainframes and about 67 percent were using its Adabas database and 57 percent used the related Natural programming language. (Adabas is a relational database from Software AG for mainframes that has been around forever and Natural is analogous to RPG in relation to DB2/400 on the System i platform.)

Of the companies surveyed, almost 70 percent of the shops said that their ability to get real-time information from their legacy systems was less than ideal, and more than 60 percent said that they worried about modifying the code in their legacy systems to meet changing business conditions. But that does not mean that they are looking to ditch their legacy systems. Some 37 percent of respondents said that had minimal to no concerns about future availability and support for their legacy platforms, and 32 percent said that there is little to no pressure on the IT department from other parts of the business (or within IT) to get rid of legacy applications. A little more than half of those surveyed said that training and keeping skilled legacy system professionals was a concern. Any of this sound familiar?

Exactly what customers plan to do to modernize their legacy systems is, at least in this survey, largely unknown. About 65 percent of the companies polled would not tell Software AG what their plans were. But the remaining 35 percent that did talk overwhelming said that they planned some sort of modernization effort to better integrate their legacy applications and databases with other systems, new interfaces, and in new ways to create whole new applications. Specifically, 75 percent of those who would talk about their plans--and they were allowed multiple responses--said they were considering application modernization in one form or another, and 29 percent said they were considering replacing their legacy platforms (in this case, that was mostly mainframes). Another 25 percent said they were thinking about rewriting their applications entirely, with 6 percent thinking about outsourcing the problem to someone else.

"The results of our recent global customer survey clearly show that legacy systems are being positioned by IT organizations as significant players in the new enterprise," explained Joe Gentry, chief technology officer at Software AG's Enterprise Transaction Systems division. "Customers are no longer asking, 'How do we get rid of these systems?' Instead they are asking, 'How do we take the business value that already resides in our legacy systems and bring this value into our new enterprise architecture to deliver business results?' I believe that the trend toward SOA has a lot to do with this shift in attitude."

You can look at the Software AG legacy application modernization survey at this link.

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