InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
August 9, 1999
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At some point, BMG will be united under a single ERP application architecture based on R/3 to support worldwide data integration and a global view of data, Dinsdale says. But "the U.S. system is going to be the last system replaced because it works, it's an expensive system to replace, and we have better places to put our money." Dinsdale points out that maintaining and upgrading BMG's S/390 mainframes, ranging from 3090 J to the latest G5 systems, represents 14% of the total IT budget.
Still, there are legitimate performance reasons to move an organization or application off legacy platforms, say some IT executives. Allied National Inc., an insurance company in Kansas City, Mo., is turning to two Dell 6300 servers running SCO UnixWare as replacements for an aging midrange system from Data General Corp., running the AOS-VSII operating system and application code from the late 1970s. The Dell servers will run new software, including the Oracle database for a data warehouse project. James Lyle, system development manager at Allied National, says that although the legacy system still handles many functions well, the number of changes taking place in the insurance industry, such as alterations in insurance laws, prompted the company to switch platforms.
With the Data General system, the company had to dedicate a programmer to generate ad hoc reports, and the run times were long, says Lyle. "One report that was generated in more than 60 hours before is taking 30 minutes now." The company is migrating slowly off the Data General system: So far, it has moved actuality reporting, business analysis, and some other components to the Dell servers, but it will likely be 2001 before it completely turns over operations to systems running on Intel processors.
One Piece At A Time
At Global Companies LLC, a petroleum company in Waltham, Mass., a project is under way to give customers and partners Web access to pricing, billing, and logistics information stored on a Unisys A14 mainframe. Global, which spends about $200,000 annually on maintenance for the legacy systems, will replace it by the end of the summer with a newer Unisys ClearPath mainframe, says Jim Shelton, IT director for Global. But the 15-year-old business logic running on the A14 will continue to support these back-office apps, which are due to be outfitted with a Windows front end.
"We keep the applications around because system support and uptime requirements are low. It's stable, robust, and recoverable," says Shelton. "It's all the things any IS executive would want." Still, Global has moved one of its financial applications off the mainframe, even though doing so cost $500,000. Shelton says Global had no choice: The vendor of the application, which he declined to name, wasn't providing support; the software wasn't keeping up with the competitive market; and it wasn't able to operate over the Internet. In its place, Oracle Financials for Windows NT now produces daily sales reports of gasoline and home heating oil for the company's U.S. and overseas retail and distribution operations. The trade-off, Shelton says, is that although NT is becoming more stable, it still crashes more than he'd like.
To make sure the Oracle data could integrate with its mainframe applications, Global is using Metagon Technologies LLC's DQbroker middleware, which performs database joins between Oracle data on an NT system and the database on a Unisys mainframe in real time.
Mainframe applications still play a huge role in the business of Sabre Inc., the travel and transportation technology company. But this IBM shop turned to a Sun E 10000 server to run a powerful yield-management application that will let it get the most revenue out of every seat on an airplane. "We needed a large, dedicated, number-crunching platform for the Airmax application," says Richard Ratliff, Sabre's VP of revenue-management applications, "and big Unix provided an alternative." He says it's hard to justify the cost of a mainframe, which typically starts in the millions of dollars, to run a single app; a typical E 10000 server runs just over $1 million.
But Ratliff admits that Solaris lacks a lot of the qualities of OS/390 on the mainframe. He says most of Solaris' shortcomings involve day-to-day operations--such as job scheduling and problem diagnostics--and failover isn't as seamless as it was on the mainframe. He also says that Unix's management tools aren't as good as those of mainframe systems; there are times when customers can't get access to Unix data because the system has to be offline for operational work. That's why, says Ratliff, "most legacy system customers replenish those systems over and over again, with no timetable for replacement."
Illustration by John Bleck
In the past couple of years, BMG has been consolidating the disparate accounting and order-processing systems used at 44 of its sites across Asia, Europe, and Latin America and replacing them with SAP R/3 running on Unix servers. The move was necessary, says Dinsdale, because of the hodgepodge of incompatible, sometimes unreliable financial systems used by BMG's international acquisitions, affiliates, and operating companies. But BMG has no immediate plans to change data center operations at its U.S. headquarters, where 20-year-old business logic drives an IBM mainframe global accounting system.
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Lyle says Allied wanted a system that can change easily and support more sophisticated products, such as relational database management systems and application development tools, and also offer better performance. "Every tool we choose must allow us to deploy apps in a client-server environment or on the Internet," he says.
Few companies do a wholesale replacement of their legacy systems. Instead, they move key pieces of their architectures onto open platforms--even if they'd prefer to keep those pieces where they are.
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