FAQs


	Who is Relativity Technologies, Inc., and what do they do? What is RescueWare? What is legacy software transformation? How big is the software transformation market? Why convert Legacy systems to the Internet or client/server platforms? Why does RescueWare offer Year 2000 functionality, if it is positioned as a software transformation tool? What dialects of COBOL does RescueWare support? What distinguishes RescueWare as the leader within the transformation market? What if I only want to transform part of my system? What platform(s) does RescueWare run on? What additional software is necessary to run RescueWare? What is the COBOL code transformed to? What is the difference between RescueWare transformation and wrappering technology? What kinds of architectures are used within the generated code? Is the transformed code portable to other platforms? What types of skills are necessary to use the product? How is the product sold? How is the product priced? How does the line-of-code charging work? How scaleable is RescueWare? How many applications can be registered into the RescueWare repository? Is the tool supported by any formal methodology? Isn't it better to just re-write the legacy system from scratch? Can mainframe systems actually run in the client/server environment? What are the cost benefits of transforming to these platforms? Who is Relativity Technologies, Inc., and what do they do? Relativity Technologies, Inc. is a software company that is first to deliver a complete solution for transforming existing legacy systems to modern Internet and client/server applications. Founded in February, 1997, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Relativity's mission is to be the leading supplier of packaged automation tools that easily and rapidly transform critical legacy software applications to modern computing environments. With a growing number of strategic applications moving to Internet-based and client/server computing paradigms the challenge has become how to move massive mainframe systems to these environments. Relativity offers a highly visual and fully integrated solution that significantly reduces the time and the cost involved in performing this legacy transformation process. The high maintenance cost and low flexibility of legacy systems, combined with the near term Year 2000 and European Monetary Union (EMU) problems, are forcing organizations to consider platform migration. Relativity provides a comprehensive set of tools to automate Year 2000 and EMU currency changes to COBOL systems, but unlike other Year 2000 tools, are the first to provide customer value well beyond Year 2000 repair by highly automating transformation and modernization paths from legacy systems. What is RescueWare? RescueWare is the first solution available that provides integrated support for all stages of legacy component mining and complete application transformation. By providing a fully integrated and visual approach, RescueWare automates the process of inventorying and analyzing legacy systems for business rule extraction, screen event mining, data modeling and code partitioning. RescueWare transforms these systems into objects, generating modern user interfaces, program code and database definitions. RescueWare also provides Year 2000 and European Monetary Union analysis and remediation as part of the transformation solution. Customers can remediate their system while capturing all the information required to transform all or part of these systems to modern platforms, providing value beyond the Year 2000. A typical legacy system is composed of hundreds of programs and frequently millions of lines of code. RescueWare provides substantial improvements in productivity by providing an understanding of what parts of the system need to be transitioned and then automating the code transformation process. The system offers an intuitive graphical user interface and automates most aspects of legacy systems modernization: Inventory Planning & Estimation Analysis Business Rule Extraction Screen Event Mining Data Modeling Partitioning into Objects User Interface Generation Application Program Generation Database Definition Generation What is legacy software transformation? Legacy software transformation refers to the process of migrating systems from older computing environments to modern computing platforms. It is more than just converting code from one language to another. It is the conversion of programming paradigms, user interfaces, and database architectures. Monolithic inline process code must be partitioned and transformed into objects. Character-based block mode displays must be transformed into event-driven GUI screens. Flat file, hierarchical or relational data structures must be transformed into ANSI standard SQL databases. Although the systems are transformed, the functionality and data from the legacy system remains the same. How big is the software transformation market? Despite the rapid adoption of client/server systems by many organizations, International Data Corporation ("IDC") estimates that there are more than 10,000 large IBM mainframe sites worldwide with over 200 billion lines of legacy code in use. A recent analysis by Gartner Group estimated the cost for manually re-writing legacy applications to modern platforms (i.e., manual transformation) to be $6.00 per line of code, implying an available market of $1.2 trillion. Relativity estimates that 5-10% of these legacy systems are candidates for transformation to modern platforms today, and that this percentage will increase significantly over the next few years. As a result, the potential market for legacy transformation today is between $60 and $120 billion. Why convert Legacy systems to the Internet or client/server platforms? A number of factors are driving transformation of legacy systems to Internet/intranet and client/server-based processing, including: Productivity gains provided by more interactive and flexible user interfaces Decreased maintenance costs resulting from modern architectures Increased flexibility enabling rapid system enhancement to meet changing business requirements Requirement for Internet/Intranet network computers A package is purchased on a new platform and other legacy systems need to co-exist on the same platform Why does RescueWare offer Year 2000 functionality, if it is positioned as a software transformation tool? Systems that are to be transformed need to be Year 2000 or European Monetary Union (EMU) compliant. Business demands may require that a system be remediated now and transformed at some later date to a modern platform. By using RescueWare for Year 2000 and EMU remediation, users can save both time and cost in future system transformation. What dialects of COBOL does RescueWare support? RescueWare supports a wide variety of COBOL dialects including ANSI 68, 74 and 85 COBOL as well as IBM MVS COBOL, VS COBOL II and AS/400 COBOL. Relativity plans to support a very broad set of COBOL dialects in accordance with user requirements. What distinguishes RescueWare as the leader within the transformation market? Relativity's first release of RescueWare for Windows is the industry's most powerful offering for the transformation of COBOL-based systems to Internet/intranet and client/server platforms. RescueWare includes: The most advanced legacy code parsing technology available today, which enables system-wide analysis of all application layers (i.e. presentation, logic and data). With this capability, customers are ensured that business rules spanning multiple programs can be extracted and combined into a single object. The automatic generation of modern event-driven object-based languages such as Java, C++ and Visual Basic. A graphical "workbench" that draws upon a proven methodology, advancing users through a step-by-step process for legacy component mining and system transformation. The workbench offers multiple windows of existing legacy and newly transformed views of the application components. This intuitively designed user interface enables development teams to quickly learn the tool and move very rapidly through the transformation process. The use of any open repository, such as Microsoft Repository or SQL Server, to track and store the many changes taking place during the transformation process. As a result, customers can address critical challenges such as Year 2000 remediation immediately while positioning the organization to meet its longer-term goal of transformation to modern platforms. Relativity's solution provides a comprehensive capability to transform legacy systems' business logic, user interface, and database to modern environments (see figure below). Monolithic inline process code can be partitioned and transformed into objects. Character-based block mode displays can be transformed into event-driven GUI screens. Flat file, hierarchical or relational data structures can be transformed into ANSI standard SQL databases. What if I only want to transform part of my system? RescueWare supports the partial transformation of systems. For example, the user interface can be extracted and implemented in HTML, Visual Basic, C++ or Java while leaving the rest of the system intact. In addition, selected business rules can be extracted from an existing system and then re-used as Java and C++ objects in the development of a new system. What platform(s) does RescueWare run on? RescueWare runs on the Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms. What additional software is necessary to run RescueWare? The base product requires no additional software to run. However, in order to maintain, enhance, and compile the generated source, development environments are necessary for each specific type of source. For example, to compile the generated Visual Basic code, the Visual Basic development environment is necessary. What is the COBOL code transformed to? RescueWare gives the user the option of transforming COBOL systems into C++ and Java for the server code and Visual Basic, C++, HTML and Java for the client. What is the difference between RescueWare transformation and wrappering technology? RescueWare actually transforms legacy source code to a modern code environment, while wrappering merely provides an interface for the legacy code to the modern code environment. With wrappering, the customer must still maintain and support the old legacy code. What kinds of architectures are used within the generated code? RescueWare generates code that utilizes state-of-the-art technology. RescueWare transformation is structured into interface, data, and business logic layers: For the interface layer, we generate: Visual Basic forms utilizing ActiveX components HTML forms with client-side scripting C++ utilizing MFC Java utilizing RescueWare run-time display objects. For the data layer: C++ utilizing ODBC Java utilizing JDBC For the business logic: ActiveX components in Visual Basic Java and Java beans C++ classes Is the transformed code portable to other platforms? Code that is implemented in C++ and Java can be ported to any platform that supports those languages. What types of skills are necessary to use the product? A basic understanding of mainframe applications is required. RescueWare does not take a black-box approach to software transformation. You don't press a button and convert an entire legacy system to another technology. RescueWare was designed to help developers have a better understanding of existing on-line and batch systems. This understanding is necessary to determine which portions of the system get transformed and which portions get thrown away. It is also necessary to have knowledge of the target environment whether it is C++, Visual Basic, Java, HTML, or ODBC to implement the new system. How is the product sold? The product can be purchased directly from Relativity or through one or Relativity's reseller partners. How is the product priced? RescueWare is priced based on a per workstation license fee plus a line-of- code charge. The line-of-code charge varies depending on the volume of code processing purchased. How does the line-of-code charging work? Basically, any legacy object that is registered into the repository has a line of code count. This includes COBOL programs, COBOL and PLI copybooks, BMS maps, database DDL, and JCL. As objects are registered, RescueWare deducts the lines of code for those objects from a `cookie' count. When RescueWare determines that you have run out of cookies, you purchase more cookies from us. Applications that are registered can then be analyzed and transformed over and over without any additional costs. How scaleable is RescueWare? RescueWare is scalable from a single user to a large workgroup. RescueWare's repository can be implemented on Microsoft Access, SQL Server, or the Microsoft Repository. How many applications can be registered into the RescueWare repository? The RescueWare workbench is organized such that a session of work is saved as a project. Multiple projects can be created within a single repository. Within a project, you can register a portion of your application, the entire application, or multiple applications. If there are interfaces or inter- dependencies between applications, then it makes sense to register these applications within the same repository. Is the tool supported by any formal methodology? The methodology for the transformation process is a series of phases and tasks, which we call roadmaps. The roadmaps guide the user through the phases of inventory, project planning and estimation, legacy analysis, and transformation. Additionally, RescueWare's architecture is structured in a way, which enables our consulting partners to incorporate their own methodology within the toolset. Isn't it better to just re-write the legacy system from scratch? Re-engineering legacy systems from scratch would take an enormous amount of additional time and resources, which many companies currently do not have the budgets for. It is also a huge risk in the sense that it is unlikely that the full set of business rules embedded in the system will be understood and manually re-programmed. A majority of legacy systems would have to be manually re-analyzed since up-to-date documentation is rare. There is an enormous wealth of information that can be extracted from existing systems through automation. Database schemas, JCL, copybooks, program logic, and BMS maps, can be analyzed by automated tools to allow a new generation of programmers an understanding of what the existing systems do and how they work. Without these tools, without any up-to-date documentation, and without knowledgeable personnel, starting from scratch for re-writing many legacy systems would be very difficult, expensive, and very risky. Can mainframe systems actually run in the client/server environment? Yes, many batch and on-line mainframe systems can be transformed to run in the client/server environment. Many systems either don't have the transaction processing volumes that require mainframe throughput or everything but the transaction processing can be moved to a client/server platform. These are obvious candidates. There are only a few situations where you may not want to convert to total client/server architecture. If your legacy system supports thousands of users and millions of transactions/day, mainframes are the preferred architecture. However, servers are becoming more powerful every day, with capacities that are sufficient now for most legacy systems. What are the cost benefits of transforming to these platforms? Based upon industry estimates, the cost of maintaining and operating legacy systems is at least 80% of an Information Systems department budget (more often 90-95%). As legacy systems become older and more patched, they are rapidly becoming more expensive to maintain. Besides maintenance costs, it is becoming harder and harder to find qualified personnel to maintain and enhance these systems. This makes it increasingly difficult to add new functionality and keep up with the business requirements. By transforming these systems to newer, more productive platforms, developers can take advantage of better, faster, and cheaper development technologies. The nature of component technologies like ActiveX and DCOM allow developers to concentrate on functionality and not on infrastructure. Distributed and object-oriented technologies allow systems to evolve quickly in response to changing business requirements and technology improvements.

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