Legacy Application Modernization

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Legacy App Modernization A GUIDE FOR BUYERS

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Legacy app modernization is not a

BY JAKUB LEWKOWICZ

L

egacy application modernization may mean different things to different people. But whether that means updating practices surrounding mainframes, adopting Agile and DevOps practices or updating to modern databases, legacy app modernization is necessary to keep pace with modern industry demands.

“Legacy modernization at large means that you take advantage of enhanced operational agility and accelerated development,” said Arnal Dayaratna, research director for software development at IDC. In addition to its many different

definitions, there are many different types of modernization efforts organizations go through. While some choose to rip and replace legacy systems and build new ones from the ground up, others choose to use fullyautomated digital migration solutions.

The important thing, however, to remember is that organizations shouldn’t be replacing legacy apps just for the sake of replacing them, Dayaratna explained.

“Every legacy app doesn’t need to be modernized. There would need to be some kind of pain point or some kind of [issue] that modernization improves,” he said. “The best practice would be to focus energy [on] modernization efforts

and initiatives [that] are contained and specific to certain goals and areas of improvement with respect to an application.”

“There’s a lack of understanding from companies that you don’t have to rip and replace all of your applications.

You don’t have to do a major overhaul with COBOL applications that have been running for years. As we say, working code is gold. And as you want to improve those applications or change them, you can do that right on the mainframe. You can do that with COBOL,” David Rizzo, VP of product engineering at Compuware, added.

According to recent research from the consulting firm Deloitte, the drivers

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Buyers Guide

tions. In addition, there aren’t many tools yet that tackle modernization, Dayaratna added.

“There is plenty of tooling to support developing new applications that are container-based or that are microservice-based… [but] there’s less tooling that is focused explicitly on transforming or modernizing legacy applications,” he said.

Additionally, Dayaratna pointed out that it’s not easy to re-architect an application in a way that makes it more suitable for modern development if there is a legacy codebase and an application with say 10 million lines of code. That’s why Dayaratna explained most instances of legacy app modernization occur in an incremental fashion.

“Let’s take a health insurance company that has a legacy app that processes claims. The claims come in and they have the patient’s date of birth, social security number, insurance identification, and different diagnosis codes that need to be processed. What the company will do is modernize that part of the application. It’s rare that an organization will transform an application wholesale. Now overtime, they may end up revamping it completely, but that

slash and burn process for legacy app modernization include the high cost of maintaining legacy applications, systems and infrastructure; and a shortage of employees that are skilled in legacy languages such as COBOL and Natural.

Additional drivers include legacy applications that take too long to update functionality and teams being prevented from working on another part of the application while updating, according to Dayaratna.

In order to address these issues, teams are trying to leverage Agile integration. However, the lack of knowledge about where to start, the steep learning curve, and the complexity end up being major challenges for organiza-

will take some time. That’s a massivegradual process,” Dayaratna said.

Mainframe modernization is essential Although mainframes may seem like a blast from the past, they are still front and center when it comes to business operations and remain a constant in an age of vast technological transformations.

Even as organizations move towards microservices and cloud-native applications, monolithic, legacy, and waterfallbased applications still power significant parts of the business, and modern CIOs don’t want to remove older systems that are working well, according to Dayaratna.

According to IBM research, who has

one of the most widely used mainframes (IBM Z systems), mainframes are used by 71% of Fortune 500 companies. In addition, mainframes handle 87% of all credit card transactions and 68% of the world’s IT workloads.

“The number one challenge that virtually every enterprise has faced, or is currently addressing, is the fact that over 80% of enterprise data sits on a mainframe, while modern endpoints (phones, tablets) are not part of the mainframe model. So the actual challenge is that digital transformation initiatives must ensure that enterprise data/services be made available to modern endpoints with the digital experience that the customer expects, but with security built-in to address CSO/regulatory mandates,” Bill Oakes, head of product marketing for API management and microservices at Broadcom, and David McNierney, product marketing leader at Broadcom, wrote in an email to SD Times.

As organizations undergo a data migration project there are many other challenges they will have to consider including the amount of downtime required to complete the migration, as well as business risks due to technical compatibility issues, data corruption, application performance problems, data loss, and cost.

While there is still little tooling for managing and modernization mainframes, the tools that are available are making significant strides. “One of the interesting things that’s happening now in the industry is that many vendors are bringing modern development practices to mainframes and enabling modern application development to be performed on mainframe based apps, which was largely not possible before,” IDC’s Dayaratna said.

Historically, developers were not able to use a browser-based IDE to develop code for the mainframe or apply autocomplete and automated debugging capabilities. Now that the tooling is catching up to modern development methods, and there will be more options for Agile development and DevOps on mainframe-based architectures, according to Dayaratna.

“What [bringing modern practices]

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allows you to do is act like every other application and every other platform within the enterprise to the mainframe has the same abilities to be developed in an Agile way, using modern DevOps tools, using modern IDEs. When you do that and modernize your development environment for the mainframe that allows you to work with the other platforms and allows for every platform across the enterprise to be looked at in the same way. It can then be integrated into the same deployment pipeline so that you can move code through whichever platform is being deployed to,” said Compuware’s Rizzo.

their data center, which is the way that is most secure and best at processing highvolume transaction processing. This way they get to keep the best of both worlds by using modern tools, Rizzo explained.

“The good ones that are being progressive or being stewards of their platforms or their industry are looking at modernizing those applications as far as being able to integrate with the modern tool chain and being able to continue to

Legacy modernization is a challenge “Modernization is all about scaling and being able to form the foundation for new data sources, real-time analytics and machine learning,” said Monte Zweben, CEO and co-founder of Splice Machine.

While some organizations decide to take drastic measures by moving their legacy applications to the cloud, this isn’t always optimal, Zweben said.

Sometimes it results in some improvements, but at a great cost.

“The app [in the cloud] is the same application that was running beforehand on premise. In short, it’s a little bit more Agile because you can bring it up and down pretty quickly and lower some operational costs. But in the end, the cost of that application can even go up in the cloud and the application hasn’t changed,” Zweben said. “We’re at the beginning of migration and modernization. Most of my predictions for 2020 is that there’s going to be huge cloud migration and disillusionment. What I mean by that is that the first step where everyone seems to leap in cloud migration. I think they’re going to be disappointed with what they get out of that.”

Compuware’s Rizzo advised organizations to integrate with a hybrid cloud solution where some of the application’s functionality that talks to the mainframe is running in the cloud.

These enterprises are able to benefit from all the years of investment that they’ve put into their mainframes and they also get to utilize the platform in

develop them, and they’re looking at ways how they can continue to keep those applications running as efficiently as they are and continue to support their customers,” Rizzo said. “So they’re looking at the future. And that’s where it’s key that they understand that they can keep them on the mainframe.”

Other organizations are taking an extreme approach to rewriting a legacy application completely on a new platform to be able to incorporate new data sources, use machine learning models and to scale, said Zweben.

“We think it is a huge mistake because with Splice Machine, you can keep the legacy application whole. We just replace the data platform underneath it, like the foundation, and avoid the rewrite of the application. This saves enormous amounts of time and money in that migration process and actually avoids real risk because you have to quality assure much less when you’re just replacing the foundation rather than replacing the whole application,” said Zweben.

Managing the technology to work in sync has also been a struggle for organizations.

“You had to bring operational data platforms to the table, either NoSQL systems or relational databases. You would have to bring analytics engine.

Typically they’re either data warehouses or Hadoop -based compute engines, SPARC based-compute engines and you bring machine learning algorithms into it. And this takes a lot of heavy lifting a distributed system engineering,” Zweben said. “And that’s hard. This is really hard stuff to configure and make work and operate.”

By using automated migration tools, companies will be able to migrate to any cloud way easier and open up new operating entities anywhere in the world on a dime,” according to Zweben.

API management is also an essential core component to digital transformation across every horizontal.

“Digital initiatives based on APIs are all about providing scalable, reliable connectivity between data, people, apps and devices. To support this mission, experienced architects look for API management to help them solve the challenge of integrating systems, adapting services, orchestrating data and rapidly creating modern, enterprise-scale REST APIs from different sources,” Oakes and McNierney said.

Another problem that needs to be solved is that there are groups in organizations working in silos.

Zweben gave the example that when an organization wants to implement AI into their applications, they’ll typically have an AI/ML specialist group working off to the side and in this case the key is to put AI people into every team instead.

“Every enterprise is dealing with ongoing digital disruption and transformation in order to remain competitive in their market — regardless of the market,” Oakes and McNierney wrote.

“Mainframe organizations understand the need to make the platform less of a silo and more like other platforms so they have modernization-in-place initiatives underway. Even careers mainframers, who have built and maintained the mainframe-based systems of record that are the lifeblood of their organizations, understand this need.” z

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How these companies can help you monitor your applications David Rizzo, VP of product engineering at Compuware Compuware delivers highly innovative solutions and integrations that enable IT professionals of all skill levels to manage mainframe applications, data and platform operations with ease and agility. As mainframe workloads continue to grow and platform stewardship shifts to cross-platform DevOps teams, providing common tools that automate, integrate and measure are key to empowering any IT professional to be productive on the mainframe, regardless of experience.

As the Mainframe Partner for the Next 50 Years, each quarter we provide customers with net-new capabilities and enhancements to existing products that empower them to mainstream the mainframe, so they can fully leverage their mainframe investments and innovate on the platform.

Our Topaz suite of development and testing solutions —

Monte Zweben, CEO and co-founder of Splice Machine Splice Machine is the platform to modernize and extend the functionality of your legacy applications in record time. These applications need to scale to petabytes by leveraging new data sources and make intelligent decisions based on that data.

Companies are rushing to modernize their applications that were written on legacy technology decades ago. To transform their applications, enterprises are either moving to the cloud, employing microservices, or rebuilding them on a NoSQL database. Each approach has its unique advantages and disadvantages. By moving to the cloud, enterprises can make their applications agile, but it is an exercise in infrastructure optimization that doesn’t fundamentally improve business outcomes. Using microservices and containerization can help enterprises rapidly deploy applications but

Bill Oakes, head of product marketing for API management and microservices at Broadcom Inc., and David McNierney, product marketing leader at Broadcom Broadcom provides a comprehensive modernization portfolio to enable enterprises to modernize their legacy mainframe back-ends with modern front-ends, including mobile, cloud, and IoT. Broadcom’s Layer7 is a full lifecycle API management solution that enables API developers to build digital assets from systems of record by integrating existing applications in APIs, modernizing mainframe services, connecting to legacy assets, or building new microservices. For front-end developers, Layer7 provides client-native SDKs that handle the security operations for each runtime transaction. The developer can focus on building a delightful user experience while the solution encrypts the channel, manages authentication and authorization using native interactions and bio-

which principally includes Topaz for Program Analysis, Topaz for Enterprise Data and Topaz for Total Test — enables developers to visualize and analyze programs; manage and prepare test data; and automate unit, functional, integration and regression testing all within a modernized Eclipse-based development environment. ISPW, Compuware’s mainframe CI/CD tool, empowers users to quickly and safely understand, build, test and deploy mainframe code.

Importantly, our tools integrate with a myriad of favored DevOps tools from companies like Atlassian, Jenkins, SonarSource, XebiaLabs, Elastic, BMC and more. We believe the only way to be truly Agile is to integrate mainframe-focused tools into a multi-vendor, cross-platform DevOps toolchain of choice.

Our full product portfolio spanning development and operations, together with integrations, ensure customers can continue to advance mainframe development quality, velocity and efficiency in support of customer-facing digital innovation. doesn’t leverage artificial intelligence. Replatforming the app on a NoSQL database enhances its scalability by accommodating massive amounts of data, but requires the application to be written from scratch, which increases its complexity exponentially.

Splice Machine is an intelligent SQL platform that enables companies to be Agile, data-rich, and smart.

Splice Machine’s approach is to migrate the application to its scalable platform without the risk and expense of re-writing. Enterprises have the flexibility to unify business analytics on the same platform and then inject artificial intelligence and machine learning natively. Now diverse applications across industries can make better decisions faster using more extensive and diverse data sets. With Splice Machine, enterprises can modernize their applications in a matter of weeks versus months or years using other technologies. metrics, and enables features that would not otherwise be possible.

Broadcom’s CA Brightside provides enterprise-grade support for, and extensions, to the Zowe framework. A modern, open source interface to the mainframe, Zowe offers a command-line interface (CLI) similar to the ones provided by cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and an API Mediation Layer that break down the legacy mainframe silo.

CA Endevor, the dominant mainframe SCM, now offers CA Endevor Bridge for Git. When combined with Zowe, this allows modern developers to use IDEs like Visual Studio Code and GitHub without disrupting their colleagues using legacy tool.

By adopting Zowe with CA Brightside and CA Endevor Bridge for Git, mainframe and distributed teams can collaborate more closely while aligning on common devops tools and practices.

Our team of experts will help your organization establish a solid API program strategy and overcome organizational, cultural, and technical hurdles to ensure a successful rollout. z

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A guide to legacy app modernization tools n

FEATURED PROVIDERS n

n Broadcom: With Broadcom, companies modernize their legacy applications by leveraging comprehensive API lifecycle management capabilities to maximize insights, efficiencies, and value across the entire organization. Their solutions include: CA Brightside, an enterprise-grade version of the Zowe open-source framework that breaks down the mainframe silo; the Layer 7 full life cycle API management solution; and CA Endevor, the dominant mainframe SCM that now offers CA Endevor Bridge for Git. n Compuware: Compuware, a mainframe-dedicated software company, empowers the world’s largest companies to excel in the digital economy by taking full advantage of their mainframe investments. They do this by delivering innovative software that enables IT professionals with mainstream skills to develop, deliver and support mainframe applications with ease and agility. n Splice Machine: Splice Machine is a scalable SQL database that enables companies to modernize their legacy and custom applications to be agile, data-rich, and intelligent — all without re-writes. Splice Machine helps organizations in demanding, data driven industries deliver intelligent decisions at scale and accelerate the speed of doing business by incorporating new data sources and AI into their operational applications. n Akamai: Akamai provides a distributed edge platform that offers intelligence to optimize devices, and capacity to move huge volumes of data and content, whether it’s broadcast to large audiences or personalized for each individual user. It also offers a defensive shield built to protect websites, mobile infrastructure and API-driven requests. n CAST Software: CAST Imaging scans and automatically understands any complex software system. It reverses engineers ‘as is’ architecture automatically, visualizes all dependencies via easy-tonavigate blueprints, zooms from overall architecture layers down to the finest detail, and enables impact analysis and To-Be architecture exploration. n Cumulus Networks: Cumulus Networks brings an open, modern and disaggregated, standards-based approach to building campus networks. It provides seamless integration with automation tools, and the ability to leverage common tools and best practices across a data center. n IBM: After its recent acquisition of Red Hat, the company offers the portable platform Red Hat OpenShift for modernizing existing IT infrastructure and apps. It also offers the IBM Garage Method that con-

nects customers to teams that help explore business goals, potential outcomes, and ideas for incorporating advanced cloud and cognitive capabilities like Watson AI, IoT, or blockchain into solutions and skill sets for teams. n Micro Focus: Micro Focus offers solutions that allow users to: modernize the application delivery process with new practices and tools for Agile and DevOps; redefine where and how applications are built and deployed; unlock and modernize access to mainframe applications and data; and build services for integrating business processes and systems. n Mulesoft: Mulesoft’s Anypoint platform enables users to connect legacy systems to digital channels quickly, lower legacy system maintenance spend, and insulate legacy systems from spikes in data requests. Mulesoft built a “WSDL decomposer” a component that dynamically ingests a monolithic WSDL, and exposes each operation’s functionality through a distinct SOAP and REST service. n Progress: Progress’ Kinvey platform uses modern microservices frameworks and low code connectors to present dis-

parate systems as a single, secure data collection or RESTful API, without having to replicate data or replatform legacy systems. It also includes patented hybrid data integration technology to get the benefits of cloud-native architecture. n Quali: Quali’s Cloud Sandboxing solution accelerates and de-risks your application modernization initiatives by allowing you to bring both legacy and new applications into a common DevOps pipeline. Automated application and infrastructure blueprints ensure that application components are reliably deployed for all parts of the SDLC. n Red Hat: Red Hat offers open, modular, cloud-ready platforms that help you transform legacy apps to modern, Agile ones, which increases business value. It’s offerings include Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), a Java EEbased application server runtime platform, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which gives full control over Kubernetes environments. n Skytap: Skytap Cloud supports modernization by offering a progressive approach to migrating and modernizing application infrastructure, processes and architecture.

It also uses an environment-based infrastructure model to provide self-service, eliminate configuration drift, and increase infrastructure utilization at global scale. n Software AG: Software AG’s Adabas & Natural Application Modernization Platform is a low-risk, cost-effective approach to mainframe integration that makes indispensable legacy business applications easier to use and more accessible.

This mainframe integration platform modernizes user interfaces, delivers business logic as services, and provides realtime access to transactional data from existing and new applications. n Syncsort: Syncsort’s Connect for Big Data makes it clean and simple to ingest, translate, process and distribute mainframe data with Hadoop. Syncsort’s Elevate MFSort provides the fastest and most resource-efficient mainframe sort, copy, and join technology. z

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