Forward-thinking organisations and businesses of all sizes have come to embrace digital technologies as a means to transform their industries and secure competitive advantage. The imperatives for change are myriad, but chief among them are the mounting demands of consumers and the increasingly blurred line between our personal and professional lives.
But, according to TmaxSoft, a global software innovator focused on cloud, infrastructure, and legacy modernisation, to meet the challenges of the digital transformation economy, organisations need to modernise their core technologies to meet consumer and staff needs – including the mainframe architectures that provide the very foundation of many businesses these days.
Carl Davies, CEO of TmaxSoft UK, stated: “Sooner or later, legacy investments in technology become a liability. Conversion costs rise as competitors with newer tech eat away at your markets. Qualified support personnel may retire or move on, and your old vendors may no longer be available. Businesses that failed to adapt are left without the needed support for their big iron and COBOL or PS/I applications. The IT department is flooded with complaints from unhappy users of the mainframe, while upgrade costs grow out of line with available budget. Additionally, the cost of third-party software to support mainframe applications continues to escalate,”
Top Ten Advantages of Rehosting:
- It helps fund necessary innovation:
Rehosting has been proven to dramatically reduce infrastructure and operating costs. These funds then can be reallocated to innovation – which may include the rewriting of legacy apps.
- It can support bimodal or two-speed IT:
Investment in legacy Unix, mainframe and other proprietary systems has dwindled, and the demand for legacy server operating environments will continue to decline. Rehosting allows a bimodal system, providing a fast, flexible foundation to quickly respond to market change and future integration requirements.
- It allows a business to exploit the cloud:
Rehosting is critical to helping an IT organisation extend its modernising apps to the cloud. Your choice of a rehosting application should offer the option of running it in a cloud.
- It’s less risky than rewriting:
Re-engineering projects can take years. Rehosting is not only faster, but it also means no changes to the underlying business logic or user interface, with no negative impact on the enterprise. It requires minimal training, and the system operates in exactly the same way.
- It increases uptime and reliability:
Rehosting give the ability to configure Active, and Active clustering across your infrastructure provides the foundation for the “five nines” of availability in this “always-on” world.
- It improves performance and manageability:
The ability to dynamically scale your environment based on business demand eliminates the need to always provide resources for peak processing – even though they may only be required for short periods of time – maintaining maximum service and reliability. You pay for what you use, with no impact on the business.
- It helps identify system inefficiencies:
Rehosting allows you to review all of your legacy code for efficiency and usage patterns.
- It enables a business to leverage existing workforce and skillsets:
Mainframe experts still exist because so many mission-critical systems in enterprises are still running mainframes. With rehosting, IT departments can leverage their existing mainframe skills as well as the skills of the open systems teams.
- It helps increase agility and time to market:
Organisations still dependent on mainframes are confronted by four realities: slow time-to-market; aging skills pools; lack of access to best-in-class software; and high maintenance costs. These factors mean that enterprises are facing a decreased ability to be agile and quick to market, which in the modern digital economy is fatal.
- It allows a business to provide the best customer experience. We live in an always-on world with consumers expecting a highly personalised customer experience, even in the virtual realm. This is one reason that digital transformation is so important for many CIOs: Rehosting allows you to unlock the value of your mainframe apps by exposing them to web services for mobile and digital applications, transforming the customer experience.
“At some point, change is no longer simply an option, but an imperative. Maintaining the status quo means accepting mediocre technology, which in turn means business performance is driven by outdated and unsupported mainframe infrastructures – placing the company in a risky position that will only get worse over time. If you’re ready to upgrade your architecture but you’re concerned with the risks, time and cost of a complete rewrite, however, there is another option: rehosting,” added Carl.
For many businesses, rehosting can be a thoroughly cost-effective way to overhaul mainframe architectures. When performed properly, rehosting provides many of the benefits of a rewrite, with significantly fewer risks and costs.
