Connectivity vendor MuleSoft found in a survey that 57 percent of enterprise IT professionals indicated the need to modernize legacy applications using APIs to make it easier for applications outside the firewall to access their data. While respondents agreed that mobile and SaaS are critical to their long term IT strategies, exposing their existing applications to be consumed by mobile and other external applications remains a primary obstacle.

“There is massive buzz around SaaS, mobile and Big Data, but the secret nobody talks about is that you can’t make it work without connectivity,” said Ross Mason, founder and vice president of product strategy at MuleSoft.

More information - http://www.sys-con.com/node/2672242

Dell Leverages Software for $6B Legacy Modernization – Significant cost savings.  Performance doubled.  Batch windows cut in half.

As I’ve written many times before, Application and Data Integration products such as Dell’s Boomi are invaluable in Modernization projects.  http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/integrationedge/2012/05/legacy-modernization-integration-agility.php

Additional information is available at http://blog.executivebiz.com/2013/03/dell-services-completes-it-modernization-project-of-6b-singapore-exchange-mark-bilger-comments/

The company statement is below:

• Dell application modernization services help enhance IT efficiency at Singapore Exchange
• Mission-critical clearing and deposit application environment migrated to a scalable, industry-standard environment
• Online performance improved by up to 100 percent; batch window cut in half

Date : 3/19/2013

Dell Services today announced the successful completion of a project with Singapore Exchange (SGX) designed to future-proof the technology underpinning its depository business and enhance operating efficiency. The project helped SGX improve the speed of a critical application by up to 100 percent, significantly lowering annual operating costs and better positioning its IT systems to align with future business initiatives.
With a market capitalization of more than US $6 billion, SGX is among the world’s largest exchanges and is Asia’s second-largest listed exchange. The exchange already offers the region’s longest trading hours and was looking to streamline IT operations and lower cost-per-transaction rates, while better preparing to address future market growth.
After a competitive evaluation process, SGX selected Dell (then Clerity Solutions) to provide end-to-end application modernization services and mainframe re-hosting technology as part of a multi-million USD modernization project. Dell helped migrate SGX’s entire mainframe complex, including key applications like clearing and settlement, third-party tools and utilities, and server and storage resources to a flexible open systems environment with minimum customer impact.
Before selecting the mainframe re-hosting solution, SGX evaluated three options: rewriting its mainframe applications; upgrading its mainframe; and re-hosting its applications to a modern, open platform. The exchange opted to re-host its application environment. Mainframe re-hosting offered the most cost-effective solution and involved less risk than rewriting.

As part of the evaluation process, SGX conducted a proof of concept and reference checks with large financial institutions like NYSE Euronext, where Dell had performed similar work.

In addition to Dell Mainframe Re-hosting software, Dell Enterprise COBOL was leveraged in the project to migrate SGX’s IBM CICS applications, batch JCL code, COBOL programs and VSAM data intact. This approach avoided costly code changes and enabled SGX clients to continue accessing its systems without reconfiguration.

Deployed in more than 50 countries, Dell Mainframe Re-hosting technology has lowered annual IT operating costs approximately 30 to 70 percent for many organizations, while providing a flexible path forward for mission-critical mainframe application and data investments.

This 15-month project concluded in October, enabling SGX to implement a scalable, industry-standard platform as part of its endeavor to future proof its IT systems. The exchange has now moved to phase two of the project, which will deliver the ability to easily and rapidly facilitate the introduction of new SGX products.

Quotes

“The application modernization services that Dell provided were delivered on time and within budget, delivering immense value to our organization. Not only has the project reduced our annual operating costs of this solution by an order of magnitude, but it has also dramatically improved our nightly batch window and we can now process double the workload of the previous environment,” said Bob Caisley, chief information officer, Singapore Exchange.

“Since acquiring Clerity Solutions and Make Technologies, we have been able to quickly build our application modernization offerings to help customers reduce the cost of transitioning business-critical applications and data from legacy computing systems to cloud infrastructure and open, standards-based platforms. Today, we have the expertise, solutions, and services to help customers like SGX migrate from a decade old legacy application to a modern and more robust framework,” said Mark Bilger, vice president and chief technology officer, Dell Services. 

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. Dell Services develops and delivers a comprehensive suite of services and solutions in applications, business process, consulting, infrastructure and support to help customers succeed. Learn more at www.dell.com.

DISCLOSURE: Hollis Tibbetts works for Dell’s Software Group as Director, Global Marketing Operations.

Stefan Ried is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and is an expert in strategic technology and technology-driven business transformation.

He recently authored a short piece on Forbes entitled SAP Gets Serious About The Large Enterprise Application Cloud” – and it’s excellent executive-level strategic reading.

Ried’s article is about how SAP is embracing a “modernization” strategy for its existing customer base – but this discussion very easily applies to all sorts of large Legacy Application software investments needing modernization. Rapidly deployable, cost-effective and easy-to-use SaaS-based applications are simply a fact of life in today’s IT world.

Hybrid Model for Legacy Modernization

In Microsoft’s taxonomy for Legacy Modernization, they call it “Extension” – Ried calls it “Hybrid”. Either way, it’s an important part of Legacy Modernization.

The concept is to “extend” the capabilities of a core legacy application system by creating a “hybrid” model – where the old legacy applications are connected to newer, typically SaaS-based applications.

With respect to connecting all these pieces together, Ried mentions that SAP is “highlighting its work with partners such as Dell Boomi, IBM Cast Iron, and MuleSoft. This is crucial for orchestrating the wide variety of SaaS applications that enterprises currently use (typically up to 12).”

As Microsoft points out, Legacy Modernization is typically a mix-and-match strategy – a combination of one or more of “extension, migration, redevelopment and replacement”.

Ried concludes with a statement that “SAP’s long-term cloud strategy needs to be a triple play: SaaS applications, an application-centric platform to extend them, and a new platform for the next generation of social business networks.”

This is sound advice for SAP. It’s also sound advice for anyone who is in the planning stages for a Legacy Modernization project.

Legacy Modernization Advice – Restated

If I were to attempt to restate Ried’s excellent advice for SAP – to make it generally applicable to Legacy Application Modernization of all sorts, it would be – how can:

1) Off-the-shelf SaaS applications be leveraged for their (typically) superior ease-of-use, faster time-to-benefit, and reduced cost of ownership?

2) An extensible platform for future “extensions” be put in place as part of the Legacy Application Modernization strategy?

3) You “build in” support for future social networking/social business networks?

According to Forrester Consulting, Legacy Modernization is a top priority for CIOs.

Forty-nine percent of firms surveyed will increase spending on legacy modernization using techniques — “which include integration at presentation, data or process layers, packaged application options, rewrites, etc.”

In a more general discussion on the topic of legacy modernization, Gartner Research as defined four key reasons why IT leaders need to make modernization a core objective.

Of the four key factors – one of them was Integration.

The four major “major contributing factors to why IT modernization is needed now” – from Gartner Research:

“Lack of agility of IT systems and services in responding to business requests for change. As the IT environment becomes more crowded and more complex, it simultaneously becomes less able to respond in a timely manner to business demand for change. Every CIO struggles with this backlog of demand, which cannot be addressed simply by working harder with the artifacts that constitute the IT environment. The IT architecture was not designed or built for agility, so working harder is not going to close the agility gap.

Increasing integration among portfolios. Integration is capable of delivering real value to the business, reducing latency and increasing the throughput capacity of the organization. However, there is increased complexity in managing service delivery and maintaining the portfolios of assets needed to support the integrated organization. These benefits come at a price with increased complexity in managing service delivery and maintaining the portfolios of assets needed to support the integrated organization.

Increased obsolescence of deployed assets. The recession in 2000 and 2001 caused many enterprises to take a hiatus for a year or two from investing in IT. IT teams learned the disciplines of placing systems on life support, squeezing the last possible value from sunk costs. Although IT management teams may well be able to keep systems on life support for some time, there is a finite limit to the willingness of business users to keep on using solutions that fail to deliver modern standards of functionality and agility.

Skills crisis. Enterprises worldwide are operating under circumstances in which a significant portion of the people who understand their mission-critical systems are eligible to retire during the next five years. Organizations should not be surprised to find that 25 percent to 30 percent of their employees with legacy skills will be eligible to retire in the next three years.

(source: Gartner Research www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=611507