Mainframe Modernization: Renewing the Enterprise

Legacy Modernization Drives Flexibility and Cost Reduction

Every IT project is built on a business case to meet corporate objectives. Over years of projects financial institutions have accumulated a wide array of IT assets. At some point the portfolio of IT investments warrants rationalization or re-balancing the asset mix. Customer’s world-wide are facing this decision and finding that weighting their investment in Microsoft technologies is a preferred option. Legacy modernization with Microsoft is all about helping customers assess and select an approach to displace older less flexible business applications.

Core business applications are the heart of a financial institution. Two or three decades ago the only option was for a customer to write the native code necessary to create that application. Most legacy platforms are still using those same applications, often using languages that are expensive to support, or with infrastructure features that are years behind industry standards. Microsoft has invested heavily to meet the demands for enterprise grade application processing. Gartner Group ranks “application server” alternatives each year, and Microsoft has won the top five positions for the last four years. Customers in all business sectors are running business critical applications on Windows Server and SQL Server technologies.

Migration projects are often viewed as a technical decision of Windows vs. legacy-platform-of-your-choice. Microsoft understands that a large financial customer will in the end select several options to transform their business processing asset mix. Microsoft has many partners who offer COTS applications from core banking to policy management. Buying a vendor application can quickly displace legacy code and restructure legacy data into a robust relational data repository. Many customers find their business requirements dictate they create complete applications themselves, and select Microsoft’s industry leading .NET developer tools for the best time-to-market solution. Customers who are satisfied with the functionality of their legacy applications but want the advantages of a lower cost infrastructure have many options from Microsoft partners who offer a broad range of re-hosting solutions.

The biggest change in the legacy modernization decision is customer acceptance of Microsoft technologies to run their most critical requirements. Selecting a technology platform is a business decision and Microsoft has alternatives for one project or a range of application requirements. Readers can find over 200 modernization case studies at www.microsoft.com/mainframe or Technorati