Jason's Blog on Oracle Modernization Solutions

Open World

Well, Open World is over, and my voice has returned.  Unfortunately, I didn't have it for much of my time during the week.  It started to go on Sunday and made a quick exit by Tuesday, just in time for my session. 

My running joke was that if I timed my ailment properly, I could use my new "Barry White" voice (you know that deep voice you get right before you've totally lost your voice) for the session around BPEL and Mainframe Modernization. Instead of the "velvet voice", I sounded more like Katharine Hepburn.  Oh well, maybe next year.


Well, a lot has been happening around modernization. Let me first take a few moments introduce you to Oracle Modernization Solutions.

Meet Oracle Modernization

For many of you, it is probably news that Oracle is involved in application modernization of legacy systems.  This is a great area of interst for us.   Here is a link to our web site where you can read more about what our charter is and what we are doing in the space. I'll give you a condensed version below.

What is Legacy Modernization?

This isn't always an easy question to answer.  It can vary as much as the answer to the "how do you modernize" question.  Basically it is this: The act of preserving the Business Content of Legacy systems while adapting to Modern Technology Environments.

So, as you can see, that can mean anything from SOA Enablement of a COBOL application, to Re-hosting COBOL from the mainframe to Linux (and still run COBOL, btw) to extracting business rules from legacy applications, refactor those and forward engineering that to a new J2EE environment. I've referenced COBOL here, simply because there is an estimated 250 billion lines of it, it is aging, resources are harder to find, well..I won't answer the why question just yet..we'll get a bit more later on.   Legacy can be PL/1, Natural/Adabas, VB, Powerbuilder...anything really.

We have developed a taxonomy to help you categorize the different approaches to modernization. They all have pros and cons, so you need to understand the "why" before you attempt the "how".

More reading can be found here on our website around the different Modernization Options.

Why Modernization a Legacy Application?

I'll save this one for my next installment.


Until next time...