InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
August 9, 1999
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"We have S/390 applications that are 10 to 15 years old," says Matheys of Schneider National. Though these applications still efficiently drive many business processes with few modifications, he says, "Schneider has too many redundant apps, with similar code snippets all over the place. When we look at legacy, we need to think about code reuse." Why? To reduce repetition, drive down costs, and improve productivity, Matheys says.
These issues can make it difficult for companies to make their data more accessible to partners and customers. Army Air Force Exchange Services worked with Micro Focus' NetExpress, an object-oriented Cobol tool, to create an interface that provided Web access to legacy data. But the company had to do housecleaning of its code when it launched its Internet operations. "Some notes by the original programmer were in the source code, and some operators added additional notes," Todd says. "We scrubbed them and put rules in to clean them up for common consumption."
Meta Group analyst Greiner says most companies opening up internal data to outsiders go through the same process. He also points out other difficulties. For example, mainframe customers are used to shutting down their systems to perform batch operations overnight, but on the Internet there is no downtime. So IS executives must deploy redundant technologies and storage that allows online administration. They also have to make sure the systems are secure for operation over the public network.
Beyond that, IT executives worry about commercial applications on their proprietary environments lapsing into obsolescence, and the problems of maintaining support staffs for these systems (see sidebar story, Recruitment: The Legacy Challenge).
Bob Cargill, systems manager for Oriental Trading, a catalog vendor of party favors and other items in Omaha, Neb., oversees maintenance of an order-management system that runs on IBM AS/400 servers. He's glad the company purchased the source code for its order-management application from Integrated System Management in 1990, because the vendor has since changed directions, says Cargill, and that could have left Oriental Trading without support.
The company spends $550,000 to $700,000 annually for hardware and software upgrades and fixes for the AS/400. It's now creating a Web-oriented transaction system, says Cargill. "When it's all up and running by February, our customers will be able to order products without talking to customer reps," he says.
With an estimated 500,000 AS/400s in the marketplace, it's unlikely that independent software vendors will give up on the AS/400 platform. But customers of other proprietary systems--such as the HP 3000, Tandem Himalaya, and Digital VAX/VMS systems, which have smaller installed bases--may have more cause for concern, despite the technical virtues of those systems, says Brad Day, a senior analyst with Giga Information Group.
IS executives should regularly check which operating systems independent software vendors are porting applications to, Day says. "A lot of the software vendors don't have the funding to do a lot of ports, and the most logical is Windows NT," says Day. "Another impetus will be the investment the system vendors make to help the independent software vendors port their applications to their legacy systems."
Legacy Loyalty
"I expect more utilization for the mainframe because of the Internet," adds BMG's Dinsdale, pointing as an example to the company's retail extranet, BMG Central. The online information repository gives key accounts access to reams of information, including BMG's upcoming products and order and relationship status, using data from BMG's mainframe order-processing and order-management systems. Says Dinsdale, "There are plenty of opportunities pushing us to maintain the legacy systems."
--with additional reporting by Tanvi Chheda
Illustration by John Bleck
To be sure, users relying on legacy systems for some or all of their applications face problems. Executives complain that business logic is cumbersome to change and modify because the programmers who originally developed Cobol applications for an internal audience typically decked out the code with notes or various redundancies. Developers following in their footsteps often find themselves writing more code to make sense of the existing code.
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Nonetheless, many users are adamant about why so many of their high-impact operations remain on legacy systems. For Global's Shelton, it's the fact that downtime is measured in minutes per decade on Unisys mainframes. Schneider's Matheys won't replace his IBM mainframe applications unless a new system will provide higher ROI, and that, he says, is unlikely. Aden of Adecco says that while he knows the HP 3000 is a little behind the technology curve, HP eventually gets it to where his company wants to be, with technology trickling down from the HP-UX-based 9000.
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