Colleen Frye over at SearchSOA hit upon a theme that goes right to the heart of many SOA projects: application modernization. Legacy applications -- defined as any system more than five years old and usually mainframes -- still power up to 80 percent of the world's applications and data.
Frye cites a recent Forrester study, sponsored by HP, that finds "organizations are dealing with a lot of applications that weren't designed for the Internet, mobile platforms and service orientation." Of the organizations surveyed, 10% have more than 2,000 applications, and 65% have 51 to 1,000 applications. The study also found that In the past three years, 56% have migrated from legacy platforms, while 46% have modernized in place.
Forrester also shares best practices it found for getting a modernization initiative rolling: "bring all parties to the table to reach an agreement (32%), increase funding/staffing levels (25%) and make a proper business case (22%)."
In a related article, Colleen also addressed the question of SOA's role in application modernization. "Organizations embarking on this route must distinguish between service orientation and service-oriented architecture, determine if legacy code is well written enough to benefit from modernization, and have a plan," she explains.
Phil Murphy, principal analyst at Forrester Research made the following case for SOA as an application modernization methodology:
Frye cites a recent Forrester study, sponsored by HP, that finds "organizations are dealing with a lot of applications that weren't designed for the Internet, mobile platforms and service orientation." Of the organizations surveyed, 10% have more than 2,000 applications, and 65% have 51 to 1,000 applications. The study also found that In the past three years, 56% have migrated from legacy platforms, while 46% have modernized in place.
Forrester also shares best practices it found for getting a modernization initiative rolling: "bring all parties to the table to reach an agreement (32%), increase funding/staffing levels (25%) and make a proper business case (22%)."
In a related article, Colleen also addressed the question of SOA's role in application modernization. "Organizations embarking on this route must distinguish between service orientation and service-oriented architecture, determine if legacy code is well written enough to benefit from modernization, and have a plan," she explains.
Phil Murphy, principal analyst at Forrester Research made the following case for SOA as an application modernization methodology:
"SOA is not the be-all, end-all to modernization or integration/interoperability challenges. We've got a bad habit in this industry of saying, This the answer; what's the question? Certainly SOA suffered that fate, as does every new thing we introduce. It's a tool in an arsenal; we forget they're just tools. They're good in the hands of good process and design, but they can make a mess just as easily as a masterpiece."The timing for service-orienting mainframe systems couldn't be better. Dancing Dinosaur relays IDC's prediction that mainframe and Unix systems sales will pick up steam later this year "as the technology refresh extends from volume to value-oriented systems, which IDC characterizes as having longer planning horizons... It's also important to note that we are in the middle of one of the sharpest periods of market inflection in a decade, and we expect significant shifts in technology usage and market shares to occur as the recovery continues."
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