Displaying items by tag: migration

At AWS re:Invent 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled plans for a new “Mainframe Migration Competency” and announced that TSRI has been identified as a launch partner! AWS recognized that TSRI’s solution — which provides near-100% automation and cloud-specific refactoring — are a huge benefit for organizations seeking reliable, low-risk, and rapid migration to the cloud. Furthermore, TSRI’s proven track record, which includes hundreds of successful modernization projects over more than 25 years, meant that TSRI would be a reliable and knowledgeable technology partner for AWS customers.

From AWS:

“Recognizing the complexity of a mainframe migration, our customers seek proven methodologies, tools, and best practices to empower successful migrations. The AWS Partner Network (APN) plays a critical role in these efforts by providing proven technology products and services for customers’ mainframe migrations.”

TSRI’s model-based solution transforms even very large (tens of millions of lines of code) legacy systems written in languages like COBOL, Fortran, PowerBuilder, Ada, MUMPS, VB6, and more than 30 other languages, into modern applications in cloud-native target architectures. The output is a modern multi-tier application that takes advantage of cloud utilities and scalability.

Now is the time to modernize for the cloud. According to AWS, “more than 70 percent of the Fortune 500 companies still run business-critical applications on mainframes, and many companies and institutions still possess legacy mainframes in their data centers. As a result of constantly evolving customer needs, the demand for modernization has accelerated as companies require increased agility to meet those needs.

“Due to the slow development cycle of mainframes, more companies are migrating to the cloud to enable rapid development and innovation. Furthermore, as mainframe subject matter experts retire and leave the workforce, these companies face an increasing skills gap.

“Coupled with high upgrade and development costs and expensive usage fees, CIOs with mainframes they must maintain are well aware of the business risks to their enterprise. As a result, a growing number of companies are looking to modernize and migrate their mainframe workloads to Amazon Web Services. These migrations enable companies to realize business benefits like an average 70 percent savings in IT infrastructure costs.”

See the AWS blog for more.

We’re excited to start the modernization journey with any organization looking to get off their mainframe and on to AWS! Learn more about how TSRI can help you transform your technology quickly and seamlessly, ensuring you and your application users can make the most of what cloud technologies have to offer.

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TSRI is Here for You

As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get started on your modernization journey today!

Perhaps you’ve seen your competition pull ahead. Maybe your customers have become frustrated with their experience as they interact with your systems. Possibly, you’ve even experienced a security breach. You know your legacy systems need to move into the 21^st century, and perhaps you’re struggling to decide how to move forward. Whether you want to face it or not, now is the time to take a hard look at modernizing your digital infrastructure.

According to salesforce.com, “while there may be a multitude of reasons for a business to undergo digital transformation, it mostly boils down to survival. Digital transformation can be risky and expensive, so it’s often a necessity for businesses that want to survive and outlast the ones that failed to evolve.”

And then there’s the expense: Daniel Newman at The Future of Work suggests that as much as 80 percent of an IT budget can be spent on maintenance. Modernizing legacy systems—even incrementally—can help a company see its capabilities leap forward by using the cloud to integrate automation into standard business processes. John Brandon at techradar.com suggests that “some of the most disruptive technologies—such as machine learning, voice bots like Amazon Alexa, and artificial intelligence—are helping to automate mundane tasks and improve how a business runs.”

These technologies run on data. In this new era of computing, the businesses that truly succeed will be the ones that put an emphasis on their data. If they haven’t already, legacy systems with limitations on their data will fall behind, especially when introducing machine learning and AI into the mix. At the same time, the data and infrastructure that have kept older systems going for so long can’t just be switched off, and freezing the systems as teams write and develop its replacement will push customers away.

Modernization effectively overcomes these risks to your organization by opening up the possibilities that an older codebase wasn't designed to handle.

“Taking inventory of what still works and what doesn’t allows companies to identify which processes are no longer relevant,” writes Newman. “Only applications deemed critical to business are then modernized; the others are simply retired, saving time and money on maintenance.”

When you decide to replace or reconfigure your legacy system, you can decide between any of these modernization options:

New Application Development. Replicate your legacy system by writing entirely new code. Your team will manually develop your new system using current coding practices with modern interfaces, and support for current technologies. This option is very expensive option, and it’s generally only usable to set a baseline for future development. You’ll incur expenses that can be as high as the original project, risk levels are similar to a typical “waterfall” project, and there are high likelihoods of time and budget overruns.

Extend/Surround. Many organizations currently opt for this method. The development teams or consultants encapsulate the legacy system in coding containers that provide APIs and tack-on integration with other systems. While the solution may work, you will have a patchwork of code, often in multiple programming languages, that gradually increases technical debt and incurs added maintenance costs. While this situation defers replacement, it will likely be costly in the long run.

COTS/SaaS. Both common off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions or cloud-based SaaS systems enable you to migrate to a less expensive and more modern architecture, but costs can easily escalate. The new system will require customization and ongoing licensing costs. Such a migration could create ripple effects on other systems and cause you to incur other costs from conforming to a completely new platform with unknown attributes.

Automated Modernization. A careful translation of code by a team of expert external engineers creates a new, modern application based upon the logic and behavior of the original. The process will include varying degrees of automation, which increases accuracy while decreasing costs. Modernization will likely incur the least risk and expense of any of these options.

Replacement of aging systems is becoming increasingly urgent, and as programmers of many of these older systems retire, replacement costs will continue to rise. An automated modernization program will likely yield the least expensive and most flexible alternative for stable, long-term performance.

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TSRI is Here for You

As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get started on your modernization journey today!

Nearly everyone wants speed, efficiency, and accuracy—especially when it comes to software applications. As companies modernize their legacy codebases and migrate to the cloud, one of the best ways to achieve top performance is to create containers for modernized code.

Code modernization has become increasingly important as we move toward integrated cloud-based and virtualized software environments. While the original legacy code was written to meet the needs of the business at that moment time, modernization of code permits these legacy applications to meet the needs of today’s organization while retaining the integrity of the original business logic. Software developers can then focus on innovation rather than maintenance. Modernization makes it possible to meet the demands of today's infrastructure requirements without high cost or compromises in security or functionality. Companies looking to expand services, access improved processes, and use resources more efficiently will need architectural changes. Bringing these trends together, containerization under Docker and Kubernetes has created a new model for application deployment that provides numerous advantages to program operation and interoperability but requires special accommodation.

Containers provide consolidation benefits by permitting application instances to be stacked in larger virtual machines. Containerization improves efficiency, security, and reduces software licensing. It reduces complexity and ensures application portability, but the boost to protecting an organization’s systems at a time when only 56% of companies are integrating security into their technology strategies cannot be understated, according to Advanced’s 2020 Digital Business Report.

To take advantage of not just the security inherent to containerization, but the potential of having systems that can be ready for the next big advances in computing, applications must be modernized to externalize APIs and microservices. It is also important to ensure proper function within a containerized environment. Modernization transforms legacy applications to operate efficiently, reliably, and securely within the new environment with identical performance to the original application.

The Three-Step Approach: Transform, Cloud-Enable, Containerize & Deploy

When thinking about modernization, organizations can take a three-step approach based on TSRI’s experience in all forms of legacy code transformation, including migration to cloud services and containerization, to reduce risk and increase success:

1.         Migrate legacy monolithic code to a service-oriented environment. This includes updating language from COBOL to Java, JavaScript, or C#, changing databases, and enabling microservices. At this step of the process, the migration also begins to abstract underlying services from the application.

2.         Integrate service-oriented applications with native cloud services. This includes re-orienting code from WebSphere, DB2, or other legacy platforms to Apache Tomcat, Amazon RDS, or other modern platforms, for example. Upgrading to incorporate the latest native architectural interfaces ensures that applications will tightly integrate with the new environment, and ensures easier updates in future.

3.         Transform native cloud to Docker containers. The movement to containers provides additional architectural abstraction and improved integration of applications within the cloud.

As with any kind of migration and modernization, organizations need to assess, tune and optimize their applications for suitability and to ensure that applications will perform adequately within the container environment without infrastructure issues that might arise from coding anomalies.

The key to a successful migration is to evaluate and model the underlying legacy code logic and to pinpoint the areas that require adaptation to the new environment. Not every application has a natural and hazard-free path to a cloud-based containerized solution. Knowledge of container operations such as ephemeral storage and parallelization issues is extremely important in managing this transition. The transformed code must also be optimized to meet the needs of its new environment.

In the case of migrating and modernizing mainframe systems to the cloud, fully automated refactoring technologies such as TSRI’s JANUS Studio® toolset transform legacy applications to cloud-native applications for containerized deployment on multiple cloud providers, including a practice devoted specifically to AWS. TSRI’s model-based solution transforms even large legacy systems written in languages such as COBOL, Fortran, PowerBuilder, Ada, MUMPS, and VB6 into modern applications in cloud-native target architectures.

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TSRI is Here for You

As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.

See Case Studies

Learn About Our Technology

Get started on your modernization journey today!

The U.S. Air Force uses the Integrated Logistics System – Supply (ILS-S), of which the Standard Base Supply System (SBSS) is a major part, as a mainstay of their supply chain. The SBSS program includes over 1.5 million lines of COBOL, as well as smaller numbers of C and Assembly, all of which are to be transformed into Java. 

Premera Blue Cross required the assessment, transformation and re-factoring of its existing Automated Document Assembly System (ADAS). ADAS was written in WANG COBOL and self generated WANG COBOL programs tailoring health care booklets for specific customer needs. TSRI was selected to assess, transform, and re-factor the WANG COBOL code, migrating the system into a C++ Windows NT environment with full functional equivalency.

Customer:  Premera Blue Cross Source & Target Language: COBOL to C++ Lines of Code: Nearly 50,000 Duration: 4 Months Services: Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Testing and Implementation Support, Transformation Blueprint®

Raytheon has partnered with TSRI on several successful modernization projects. Specifically, several years before the Patriot-Japan project was initiated, Raytheon was tasked with modernizing a set of Patriot Missile Simulation software. Following a formalized decision process, TSRI was selected as the best option for transforming the code from FORTRAN to C++, due to our unique fully automated transformation technology.  So, when Raytheon began modernizing Battalion Simulation Support System and its Preprocessor for the Japanese Patriot Missile system, TSRI was contacted and began work.  

Customer: Raytheon Source & Target Language: Fortran to C++ Lines of Code: 25,927 Duration:  10 months Services: Code Transformation from Multiple Legacy Languages, Automated Refactoring, Installation and Testing Support, Transformation Blueprint®​

Capita, a company based in England and Wales, determined that one of their important software assets called PRISM required modernization, including code transformation, platform migration, and database migration. Capita engaged TSRI, with their proven automated modernization services, to complete this project, which was finished in 3 months.

Customer: Capita Source & Target Language: BASIC to PL/SQL Lines of Code: 660,000 Duration:  3 months Services: Transformation Blueprint®, Automated Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Integration and Testing Support

BAE Systems received an award from South Korea's Defense Acquisition and Procurement Agency for a multi-year project to upgrade 134 Korean Air Force F-16 (KF16) fighters.  The upgrade included obsolescence management for the computers and operating systems for near real-time tactical data and voice information and including the Core operational flight programs: Advanced Mission Computer (AMC), Upgraded Central Interface Unit (UCIU), Cockpit Display Generator (CDG) and the Center Pedestal Display (CDP).  BAE Systems employed TSRI for their modernization services to modernize and document the Jovial source code to C++.

Customer: Bae Systems Source & Target Language: Jovial J73 to C++ Lines of Code: 340,000 Duration:  6 months Services: Code Transformation, Automated Refactoring, Installation and Testing Support, Transformation Blueprint®, Application Blueprint®

Stanley and Assoc. contracted TSRI to modernize the Battle Command Software - Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS).   This system is an integrated system that provides the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps automated fire support command, control and communications.  Prior to this modernization, AFATDS was written in legacy Ada-83.  The target code selected for the AFATDS modernization was Java.

Customer: Stanley and Assoc. and The US Army Source & Target Language: Ada to Java   Lines of Code: 5.1 million Duration:  10 months Services: Application Blueprint®, Automated Code Transformation, Transformation Blueprint®, Automated Refactoring, Engineering Support