I came back to Gartner's 2013 strategic trends article recently after a conversation with one of the team here. Some of our customers use legacy, or heritage, or investment or existing (you choose the title!) applications to run their corporation. One of the biggest issues they had was getting real-time reporting information out of their flat file databases. As Gartner highlighted, the trend is towards actionable analytics.

Now if the only way to get your data out of your existing systems is to run an ETL process every night, your business is always ahead of your data. We've worked with clients whose order to delivery process is under 24 hours, so they had delivered the orders before the management team got sight of its existence. If you are running a continuous improvement program this restricts your ability to drive change.

By working with our customers during the past two years we have created a DataSync option that provides a method of replicating transactional updates from legacy systems into relational databases of any flavour, and very low latency (typically milliseconds). This enables our customers to integrate their data from existing operational systems into Cloud and on-premise reporting solutions. As with all things, repoprting has improved over the years; from paper-based printed output to KPI dashboards available on mobile devices, the speed of change has been tremendous. The last area to be improved on is the latency of the data, and with DataSync we've even addressed this.

If you have read any of our other blog articles, you'll know by now that we quite like mobile devices and what they can do for the business. Interestingly, by combining our DataSync capability with mobile we can deliver actionable analytics. It seems my team mate was right - Gartner are in agreement with us!

Decisions made on our business systems today will affect us for the next 3, 5 or even 10 years.  Being as none of us has a crystal ball all we can do is use the information available to us today from our own personal ecosystem to establish a view.  It was while reviewing Gartner’s 2013 trends piece it reminded me of why we’re in this business.  That’s because systems are never finished, are in a state of flux and our sources are often influenced by fashion.

So this is my take from their piece.  Mobile is not a trend, it is happening.  The business value, although not completely understood in every facet of your company, is so significant that not to be considering it will put you at a competitive disadvantage. 

The decision to support Apple, Google or Microsoft is simple, it needs to be all three, particularly with sight of BYOD and the emerging value of Windows Surface to the enterprise.  The argument over Native vs Hybrid Web is a distraction.  Ask the development team and the answer will be Native if they have a history in consumer apps because it gives the best user experience, and Hybrid or Web if they have an enterprise background as it’s easier for them to build and integrate with performance.  Ask a Chief Exec and it will always be Native, as anything else in their view, is less.

The reality is that it needs to be all of the above, depending on the type of interaction, back end integration, security, and offline data requirements.  The consensus for line of business transactional mobile apps is Hybrid Web with possibly some Native components to deliver specific new functions.

Our customers are moving this way with nearly 1/4 already in development or delivery of mobile applications and another 1/3 working on it this year.  You can see the results of our recent survey here if you’d like to see more trends.

Most substantial enterprises, which have been in business for 20 years or more, now find themselves with a complicated IT infrastructure. They have a number of core business systems that are based on different technologies, some old, using proprietary languages and legacy data structures, some new, usually based on .NET or Java and using RDBMS data.

One of the challenges facing businesses in this situation is that, in order to maximize operational efficiency, and enable timely access to data for reliable business intelligence, they need to find ways of enabling integrated access to all of the business data, whatever the source.

Transoft was recently contacted by a company in this situation. They have a 20 year old custom-built application, operating on legacy data structures, that is absolutely fundamental to the operation of the business. Their problem was that they were unable to easily and efficiently extract data for business intelligence and also had problems in integrating the legacy data with new business systems.

In many cases, application integration tools provide the solution to these problems but, in this case, with no access to the source code of the application, options for application integration were very limited.

An alternative approach, provided by Transoft’s DBIntegrate,  is to capture changes to the legacy data structures, as they happen, and use those changes to keep an integrated BI database synchronized with the operational data in ‘near real-time’.  DBIntegrate Data Sync has been designed to ensure minimal impact on the operational system while updates to the RDBMS happen just milliseconds after the operational data is updated.

DBIntegrate has now been deployed at the company in question. A SQL Server database is updated with operational data captured from the legacy system, cleansed and transformed to provide real-time data quality controls. The SQL Server database provides the basis for BI reporting and also enables integration with other systems, without having any impact on the operational systems.

Click here to find out more about our solution.

Data Synchronization.pdf (1.39 mb)

We know there are some challenges with core legacy applications – they can be difficult to modify, less well integrated, disproportionately more expensive to run and function on proprietary platforms. Legacy transformation, which retains and extends the value of the investment in these applications, is seen as a low risk, low cost solution to some of these problems. But what exactly is legacy transformation, are we simply talking about migrating applications onto a new lower cost platform?

Certainly re-platforming existing applications is the first step to reducing operating costs and positioning legacy applications in richer, more agile integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Microsoft Visual Studio or Java Eclipse. However the transformational journey doesn’t end there.  You can go on to implement an improved user interface delivered, typically, via the browser; or perhaps replace legacy flat file (ISAM) data sources and older proprietary databases with a modern, robust RDBMS such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.

These new platforms and IDEs will then provide access to modern technologies such as Web Services, and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). These can be used to transform core applications to be more closely aligned with current and future business needs through the addition of exciting new functionality such as Mobile apps and Cloud services delivered via the Web, tablets and smartphones.

All of these steps are incremental, ensuring ever higher user expectations can be met through the core business functions delivering “information everywhere” regardless of source.

So to sum up, migration of legacy applications from an old proprietary hardware platform to a modern environment, is usually the first step in the transformational journey but it doesn’t stop there – it opens doors to a wealth of other possibilities so that your organization can:

• Preserve the considerable investment
• Reduce cost of ownership
• Improve the existing user interface
• Replace older data sources with more robust RDBMS
• Improve agility to more quickly meet new and changing business requirements
• Allow SOA integration with Cloud services to deliver exciting new rich functionality via Web, tablets and smartphones
• Position these applications to meet ever more demanding user expectations

Watch our recorded Webinar: "Application Migration - Your First Step To Transformation"

Download our Application Migration Solution Sheet

You have a core application that is vital for your business but it isn’t able to take advantage of the latest technology. There are a number of options for resolving this, and initially the re-write “rip and replace” may sound attractive – particularly to your IT development department. It would seem to offer the ability to redesign your application to best meet the current needs of the business. However some significant disadvantages are often overlooked:

• It requires the full life-cycle effort of developing a new application - but more so as the specification needs to include all the functionality of the existing app which may be undocumented and difficult to extract from the source code
• Typically a new development team is required as the existing domain experts have day jobs
• The scope usually creeps leading to time and cost overrun
• Testing is significant - everything must be tested
• Existing users will need retraining
  

This all adds up to high risk and cost – most projects of this type fail!

Some organizations consider using a package within a “rip and replace” but this will have similar disadvantages. The package is unlikely to be an exact fit and you will still need to document the legacy app to define missing functionality. This functionality will then have to be developed with similar problems to the full re-write, and although the risk is certainly not as high it is still significant and in the majority of implementations there is project slippage and cost overrun.

So what is the best solution?

Application migration performed by automated conversion tools offers key advantages:

• Overall effort is considerably reduced - the migration plan doesn't include a spec for functionality as the business logic doesn't change and business uniqueness is retained
• Testing is significantly less as the application has not fundamentally changed because automated tools ensure consistency
• There will be minimal retraining, if any, even if an improved UI is included, as users will continue to recognise the application 
• With automated tools there is no requirement to freeze the code at the start of the project
• Using a specialist migration vendor means no increase in your development resource and usually your vendor will undertake the project on a fixed price and timescale basis.         

We have 20 years of experience in this field – click here to read our latest successful case study, or get in touch if you would like to know more.

HP confirmed on August 1, 2012 (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2012/120801c.html), that the Superior Court of the State of California had ruled that Oracle’s obligation to continue to offer its 'product suite' on HP's Intel Itanium-based server (Integrity) platforms lasts until such time as HP discontinues sales of its Itanium-based servers. The Oracle product suite for Itanium includes Oracle and Rdb databases on the OpenVMS operating system.

While Oracle apparently never stopped development of Rdb for OpenVMS, with the current version 7.3 available on both Alpha and Integrity servers, the Oracle database porting was resumed following the court case. Oracle 10.2.0.5.0, which requires OpenVMS 8.4, is planned to be released shortly on both Alphas and Integrity servers.

So what does all this mean for the OpenVMS user? While the resumption of supply of Oracle's two key databases on Integrity servers will bring obvious comfort, particularly to larger OpenVMS users, this does not change the many other business drivers prompting organizations to look at OpenVMS migration:

• OpenVMS can't support evolving business needs – migration positions applications to drive technical innovation including mobile devices and Cloud integration
• OpenVMS systems are stand-alone and the data is in a silo - migration enables easier integration of systems and data to improve flexiblity and data re-use
• The need to minimise risk and cost - migration is low risk and highly cost-effective compared to re-write or package implementation
• Declining OpenVMS development and support skills - provide access to a larger pool of skills by migrating to a .NET or Java development environment, and also improve productivity
• OpenVMS is not a corporate strategic platform - migration reduces the cost of supporting multiple environments
• ROI in business critical OpenVMS applications – migration extends their useful life and prepares them for further modernization.

We’ve made a number of changes to the way we describe ourselves recently that were aimed at simplifying our messages and demonstrating how we are aligned to keeping our clients’ systems relevant to today’s business environment. 

Core to this change was to examine how our customers look at their business issues and the challenges that are affecting them over the next 6, 12 or 24 months.  To this end we undertook customer surveys to actually ask our customers what changes they are facing so we could factor them into our plans.

Spoiler alert!  Not wanting to give the survey results away too early, as a business we have chosen to focus on delivering mobile device access to existing systems (50% of our customers are looking in that direction over the next 12 months), Hybrid Cloud integration (25% over the next 12 months), data quality and integration (1/3 of our customers over the next 12 months), and legacy migration (43% over the next 12 months).

 So how do we describe ourselves now?  Read more here - I’d welcome any feedback or thoughts you have on it.

Traditionally, ownership of data in business systems has been the responsibility of the IT department. This made sense when each stand-alone legacy application just needed access to its own private silo of data.

However, the world has changed. Organizations now need more open and accessible data that can be shared and not silo’d in order to maintain competitive advantage.  Successful businesses are having to look at new strategies for data management and are now focusing on maximizing its value.

There has been a radical shift in the mind-set of business, away from the traditional view of data as a liability, to seeing data as one of its most valuable assets.  New roles, called Data Stewards, are being established to help drive an increased level of data understanding, improve data quality and deliver organization wide consistency across an information set. This allows greater value to be extracted from the data, and the whole data ecosystem to be mapped out which is a key requirement for any Master Data Management program. Once an organization knows the business and data integrity rules across its information a Data Steward can then decide how it can work across applications, business units, or even between companies, to become thoroughly integrated and help drive business efficiency.

It is the people within a business that use the data, and best understand the tremendous potential value in the data assets.  All of us, whether we work in sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing, or customer support, share some responsibility for our data.  Get involved in decisions around the data, and see the benefits we can reap in future productivity.

We produced a White Paper recently that outlines some of the reasons that cause our data to degrade over time.  You may even recognise some of these behaviours from within your organisation!  If you do, let us know how you dealt with them and the results achieved.

Business Led Data WP_May12.pdf (128.91 kb)

I think most of us would agree that data is potentially one of the greatest assets an organization can have.

However, many companies struggle to maximize the true value of this data for their business because it is full of errors with plenty of duplicated records.

How do these duplications come about? Usually for a number of reasons:

• Lack of processes, such as not checking historical or archive records to see if they can be re-opened
• Inconsistent standards for formatting and abbreviations, such as using nicknames or substituting words for shorthand text e.g. "Dr" for "doctor"
• Poor data validation, particularly when it comes to addresses
• Staff taking shortcuts, where it is quicker to set up new records than find the original
• System integration requirements to avoid overriding old data, where whole new records are created, such as a worker switching from a PAYE to LTD pay scheme
• Poor training, where a user can't properly search databases

The ideal is to have one "golden record" for each contact. This is where data de-duplication has taken place, identifying matching records from a variety of data sets, and then merging these together to leave one complete record intact, with associated records linked together correctly.

Take a look at the options available for making this a reality in your organization - your Marketing Department for one will be eternally grateful!

Data_Deduplication_June12.pdf (137.35 kb)

“In information technology, legacy applications and data are those that have been inherited from languages, platforms, and techniques earlier than current technology. Most enterprises who use computers have legacy applications and databases that serve critical business needs.” SearchDataCenter.com

It used to be that when we referred to applications that an organization had invested in over time, and nurtured through the years, that we avoided the term “legacy”. There was a fear the word could convey negative overtones, be construed as a disparaging term for something old and locked in the past.

But if this negative perception was ever true, it certainly isn’t today. In our current economic climate of thriftiness the concept of re-use and extending the life of existing applications has become increasingly attractive. Businesses are looking to make the most of the investment in these often bespoke applications, and to get even greater return on their spend.

Exciting new tools and technologies that integrate with these legacy applications can provide a “best of both worlds” solution. The existing applications that often provide the crucial competitive advantage for an organization can be utilized to the max with the latest initiatives, to provide cutting edge and inexpensive solutions that keep a business agile.

Legacy data and applications have unashamedly become something to be proud of. They have a part to play in the ongoing success of organizations fighting to stay ahead of their competitors.

The term “legacy”, it turns out, is actually very appropriate in a positive way… something valuable is being handed down from the past to continue to enhance the future of the organization.