January 10, 2006

Got Legacy? Four Fates Await Your Applications

Several Trends Converge To Help You Rationalize Intelligently, Prepare For SOA

This is the first document in the "Application Management Strategies For Legacy Applications" series.

by Phil Murphy

with Mike Gilpin, Lindsey Hogan

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Organizations have wasted untold millions on purported one-size-fits-all solutions to their legacy application issues: dump the mainframe; rip and replace; move it all to Unix; and, most recently, outsource it all. As they adopted these solutions, IT managers slashed application maintenance budgets to dangerous levels to fund these efforts. Despite those efforts, today, most organizations are no closer to a permanent solution than when COBOL was the predominant programming language and indexed file access methods were considered revolutionary technology. Several recent trends indicate that IT organizations are ready for a break with the past. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a viable "future state" target, and IT managers are now admitting that they will keep some legacy applications much longer. In combination, these two factors are driving vendors to offer complementary tools and services to enable application reuse, and they are heightening interest in application portfolio management (APM) tools to create application metrics and visibility into IT activity. The stars have finally aligned to enable knowledge-based application rationalization and modernization.

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