How to Visually Dissect Legacy Applications

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Application modernization is not an all-or-nothing proposition. When it comes to legacy application software, it turns out that not only is there a lot of duplicate code, but a lot of functions are better handled by a packaged piece of middleware. In fact, you might find 60 percent of the code running on a mainframe, for example, could be eliminated or replaced by middleware running on a less-expensive platform.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all legacy application code should be replaced. Most of the business logic in, for example, a COBOL application running on a mainframe might be more trouble than it is worth to rewrite. But IT organizations should take a hard look at exactly what type of code is running where on their mainframes because chances are that more than half of it isn’t really necessary. READ MORE