Legacy Transformation and the Year 2000

Report Summary
The impending deadline for Y2K compliance has caused a re-evaluation of which legacy systems are valuable and which should be migrated to less expensive platforms or discarded altogether. Many IS departments have opted for buying packaged applications to replace mainframe systems, but the job of compliance is not yet finished and the time for safe replacement with off-the-shelf software is past. Therefore IS is still faced with the task of remediating thousands or even millions of lines of COBOL code with no strategic value to the organization other than keeping the business running after the Year 2000 (Y2K) deadline. An ideal scenario would be to find a way to fix the millennium problem, clear out all but the most necessary COBOL code, reuse as much business logic as possible, and yet still be able to implement new systems.

The dilemma for organizations trying to replace old systems by migrating them to Year 2000 (Y2K) compliant and more cost-effective platforms is that in doing so, IS loses all the investment and time it put into developing and fine-tuning mainframe applications over the years. Aberdeen research suggests that the best options for IS seem to be:

• To create hybrid systems that meld legacy applications and data with new technology and applications, or
• To somehow retain some of the knowledge and expertise inherent in the legacy code and data, but deploy it on a modern platform.

It's at this point that Relativity Technologies steps in with RescueWare, one answer to the age old dilemma of how to preserve what is good and useful in applications and reuse it, while disposing of the old, inefficient, and Y2K non-compliant. RescueWare is an automated legacy code transformation solution that moves existing screens, business logic, and data to client-server and the Web. Simply put, RescueWare is a repository-based application that runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT and transforms COBOL code into C, C++, Java, or Visual Basic. It takes application code, parses it, combines related elements into modules, and then generates new code.

Aberdeen research shows that RescueWare can offer IS the chance to recycle as much as 25% to 100% of an organization's legacy COBOL systems, depending upon the type of application being built. User research also indicates that the reuse of existing code, especially when tied with an automated transformation tool, can cut development efforts by at least one-third. Some users even experienced what they say is a reduction of efforts by one-half. Based on this information Aberdeen views RescueWare as a significant potential contributor to any organization's Year 2000 or EMU efforts, with a significant payback in getting the efforts finished on time and in expanding and extending the value of existing legacy systems code.