Under ever-increasing business pressure to innovate, IT decision-makers are asking ‘Can our core enterprise applications help us pursue new opportunities?’ Too frequently, the answer is no.
A company’s core business applications are often proven and valuable information assets. But they can be viewed as old, inflexible, and one-dimensional, only delivering specific functions for an organization. These applications are subject to more scrutiny than ever before: Are they strategic for the business? Do they open new doors of opportunity for the business? Can they embrace modern technology, deliver new services, and improve their operational efficiency?
This applies to many of today’s core enterprise applications. Mission-critical, they continue to offer high value services to their users but are no longer considered strategic, innovative, or market-changing. With millions of lines of code invested in these enterprise applications, discarding them is just not an option – it is too expensive, too risky.
Platform alteration
Often, the major impediment for these applications is their platform. Many of these applications are ‘locked’ into a proprietary platform architecture, hugely expensive to maintain and inflexible to change. If the applications – and the intellectual property that resides within them – rather than the platforms are giving your organization a strategic edge against your competition, it makes sense to salvage these core applications when moving away from the platform.
Application re-platforming has liberated enterprise applications that were once locked into proprietary systems – and Micro Focus Visual COBOL® should be at the heart of your application re-platform strategy. Visual COBOL is the next generation of COBOL development and deployment solutions for today’s critical business applications. It represents evolution, not revolution and can bridge the gap between your existing systems and the next generation of contemporary applications. By using subject matter expertise from our specialty partners, organizations can re-purpose their core application assets for new business initiatives.
As Scot Nielsen explained in ‘Platforms, Platforms, Platforms’, today’s IT organizations demand contemporary choice and platform freedom. This ‘platform independence’ increases agility and improves responsiveness to change. Micro Focus has successfully worked with our specialty delivery partners in delivering more than 500 re-platform projects, taking them from proprietary platforms such as Unisys, HP, Bull and others and on to more flexible, modern architecture.
This really works
For example, the City of Miami cut their IT costs by more than 50% and their government operations enjoyed more freedom to innovate. Similarly successful re-hosting projects at Scottish Life and Express Newspapers took Unisys-based application assets to more contemporary platforms with consequent cost savings and improved openness and freedom to future-proof their core business applications.
Exploiting application reuse through platform rehosting can deliver greater business agility as well as significant budget savings. Re-platforming your business applications allows them to respond to changing technology trends, embrace modern architectures such as .NET JVM, Cloud and make more of mobile computing. It’s your chance to take your applications into tomorrow.
A successful application re-platforming strategy can meet a legacy platform challenge, deliver immediate – and significant – value and empower innovation and opportunity.
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