Jason's Blog on Oracle Modernization Solutions: March 2009 Archives

Legacy Modernization and Open World Latin America

By Jason Williamson on March 2, 2009 11:43 AM

Hey Folks,
I wanted to make a quick post before Open World LAD begins next week. If you are headed down, drop me a post. There are a lot of modernizations going on in that region, and I'm eager to see about helping keep that momentum.

There are a few partner booths to check out and speaking slots that will focus on legacy modernization. I have one, but don't know the session yet, and will post when i get those details.

Accenture, HP, XSeed all will be there and have done modernization projects...so seek them out!

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mainframe and Legacy Re-Architecture (Part 1)

By Jason Williamson on March 4, 2009 10:55 AM

I see over and over an ongoing debate regarding re-hosting the legacy platform and re-developing re-engineering it. The answer to that question is always, IT DEPENDS. Any of these discussions should not start with an particular approach (SOA Enablment, Rehosting, Re-arch, COTS...etc) but should begin with a business discussion.

So, given that caveat, i want to spend the next few posting to re-architecture and some thoughts behind what it means and how you do it. It isn't a straight rip and replace, or a pure ground up re-write.

What is Re-architecture
In Re-architecture, the strategy is to reverse engineers legacy applications to preserve business knowledge then forward engineers applications to modern architectures which take advantage of open and extensible standards. Characteristics of re-architecture include:
• Application Discovery - Understand applications and develop ‘AS IS’ models using legacy understanding tools.
• Mine and Extract - Mine and extract application business knowledge (business logic / business rules) into a platform independent model.
• Forward Engineer --Forward engineer applications and data to modern architectures using model based design techniques
• Accelerate -- Accelerate application generation for core J2EE application components
• SOA -- Develop and integrate application web services within a service oriented architecture (SOA)
The main point here is that this process is not manual, and it is not fully automated either. With the use of tools and sound process, you can greatly lower the risk, cost and time to market when re-developing legacy applications.
We will dive into these a bit more later in this chapter, and through a step-by-step example later in the book. Re-architecture is distinguished from greenfield development in that engineers utilize the existing application as the specification, and possibly a framework for future development. The promise of this strategy and the strength found in the ability to identify, untangle and isolate legacy business rules for future modeling, enhancement and development. Re-architecture is also distinguished from platform-migration, where tools are used at an automation rate of over 80%. As mentioned earlier, the platform migration method will often deliver code in a new technology (language) but it will
• resemble the legacy paradigm
• is usually unmaintainable
• is a one-to-one transliteration and almost impossible to add enhancements during the migration process.

Drivers and Considerations for Re-architecture
When considering what approach is best for your organization, it is critical to identify what the drivers are for the effort. These can be divided into two general categories of business and technical. We’ll review some common drivers for re-archticture with the objective to help identify when it is a correct choice to take this route. Also, along side mentioning some of the key drivers that make this a good option, we’ll also examine some of the considerations that need to be weighed in light of a re-architecture

Re-Architect starts with learning everything about an existing application (e.g. what it does, how it does it, why it does what it does) and then designing and rewriting the application to take advantage of newer technologies to be more portable, more agile and more scalable. The following are key drivers for a Re-Architect modernization effort.
• Mainframe costs high and continuing to escalate
• Utilization of standard platforms and more off-the-shelf applications
• Positioning applications for next-generation technology
• An IT infrastructure that is easier to manage, maintain and upgrade
• IT continues to increase in criticality to the business
• Current application architecture is not flexible and adaptable
• Reduced total number of applications & platforms
• Implement application changes in days not months
• Major driver is (additional) business functionality
All good IT organizations want to reduce total cost of ownership, increase their ability to react to business demand, and minimize reliance on legacy skill sets – all the while insuring that they are meeting new compliance demands. Forrester reports that 85% of CEO’s view their IT organizations as an inhibitor to innovation. So there is a great drive to allow business to do more than just sustain, but to react. Technology’s promise is innovation, and now it has become like lead boots on a marathon runner.
As we stated above, legacy modernization allows the IT organization to leverage the investment made in core IT applications as a springboard for future development, instead of just throwing it out. We can leverage these legacy assets to deliver a lower TCO business with an increased level of agility, and ultimately an an agent of innovation for the organization.
Of the different modernization options, re-architecture allows for the highest benefits in terms of increased agility, lowest cost and eliminating the reliance on legacy skill sets.

Platform Agility
What do we mean that re-architecture provides the highest benefit in terms of agility, TCO and reliance on legacy skills? To better understand this lets review the modernization options in terms of business benefits. The following chart is a compare and contrast of the Legacy Modernization options and how they impact the business with respect to costs, agility and human resources.

Modernization Option	Agility	Reliance on Legacy HR	TCO*
SOA Enablement	Low-Medium	HIgh	High
COTS	Low-Medium	Medium	Medium
Platform Migration	Low-Medium	High	Medium
Re-Architecture	High	Low	Low

Human factors to consider in a Re-Architecture project
The objective to any successful modernization effort is to add clear business value. Many organizations begin these efforts for the wrong reasons. The force behind any modernization effort should be driven by the business.

The human factor is also a key business issue that needs to be managed properly for a successful modernization project. Some examples to consider include:

Table 1. Business Considerations for Modernizations

Issue	Description	Mitigation Actions
Job Loss	The technologist of the existing system often sees a modernization project is a path to unemployment. Managers and team members may not have a commitment to the success of the project and can be a hindrance to overall success.	· Utilize team as critical SME role. (See Technology Issues)[NB6] · Re-tool personnel in new technology. · Job loss is a reality in some business drivers. Prepare ahead of time on personnel attrition. · It is important to understand that the value of these individuals is in their business knowledge, not technical skills. They can be taught new technical skills more easily than developing business skills in new employees.
Resistance to Change	With any change, even for the better, comes resistance. End users have used a particular screen or set of keystrokes for years and any alteration to this will not be well received.	· Involve user community. They are an integral part of migration testing. · Involve end users as early as possible in the modernization process.

Issue

Description

Mitigation Actions

Job Loss

The technologist of the existing system often sees a modernization project is a path to unemployment.

Managers and team members may not have a commitment to the success of the project and can be a hindrance to overall success.

· Utilize team as critical SME role. (See Technology Issues)[NB6]

· Re-tool personnel in new technology.

· Job loss is a reality in some business drivers. Prepare ahead of time on personnel attrition.

· It is important to understand that the value of these individuals is in their business knowledge, not technical skills. They can be taught new technical skills more easily than developing business skills in new employees.

Resistance to Change

With any change, even for the better, comes resistance. End users have used a particular screen or set of keystrokes for years and any alteration to this will not be well received.

· Involve user community. They are an integral part of migration testing.

· Involve end users as early as possible in the modernization process.

How IBM views re-architecture
Much of the messaging put out by IBM around migration and modernization centers around growing the Mainframe footprint. The story centers around application consolidation, open architecture and virtualization. Further, with Z/Linux, organizations can run their Java applications on the same mainframes that they are running their COBOL/CICS and batch applications. Much of the white papers and strategies of IBM on this topic focus on the reliably of the mainframe, the scalability of Linux on the mainframe and the TCO of the Z platform.It is important to note that this book it taking an agnostic view to hardware and address the problems around the pain centered on applications. While we think it is good for some customers to stay on their Z platforms, we are addressing what to do with the legacy applications. If an organization has determined they want to migrate their applications from Z/OS, we want to provide a road map of how to get there independent upon the selection of hardware.

Next Posting: IT/Technical Drivers and Considerations

Tags:

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Open World - Latin Style

By Jason Williamson on March 11, 2009 6:14 PM

Greetings from Open World Brazil
Boa tarde de Sao Paulo.

I'm just finishing up my trip to Brazil and I'm sitting in the Airport ready to head back to the states. I have to say this year was quite a great event. I was a little uncertain as to the attendance numbers given the current financial climate, but it seemed bigger than 2007.

Newly completed bridge near the Hilton Hotel.

It was great to reconnect with my PTS (and ex-PTS) brethren. I even spotted the famous blogger (and ex-PTS buddy) Juan Ruiz, from the JDev team.

We had some great opportunities to show of new Oracle Technologies and discuss solutions around Legacy Modernization.

Above Jason and Jorge

We had some successful sessions talking about Oracle Modernization and the Application Modernization Initiative
. Here we discribed some success stories with Mainframe Integration, Rehosting and Re-architecture of legacy mainframe system to the Oracle stack.
It was tough to meet everyone, and all of the customers, but I would say it was a good event. Well worth the 12hr journey from Raleigh, NC.

Anyway, time to board.

Até logo!

Tags:

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mainframe and Legacy Re-Architecture (Part 2)

By Jason Williamson on March 13, 2009 3:28 PM

Don't forget to see the entry about Open World in Latin America!

So we pick up with Part Two...Mainframe Legacy Re-Architecture...and some of the technical considerations of this.

IT/Technical Drivers and Considerations

When the business considers re-architecting their entire platform there are a common set of drivers that are behind many, if not all modernization projects. Earlier in the book we’ve examined a few of the modernization options like SOA enablement and platform modernization. With the rearchitecture strategy, there are some key technical drivers that we are trying to accomplish that are unique to this method. Below, we will examine a few of those areas.

Get off the mainframe

There is a large push by organizations to get off the mainframe. This push is more often than not a function actual application that is running on the mainframe instead of the lack of ability in the hardware itself. As we observed previously, the IBM Z platform can run any open system technology that organizations are able deploy on a given white box Unix/Linux system.

The problem exists when confronted with the COBOL (or other legacy code base) applications. The architects and trusted advisors of the target architectures do not have knowledge or experience in the legacy mainframe environment. Combine the cultural shift with with the high costs of mainframe hardware, operating system and third party applications for things like tape management, monitoring and integration, one can see why this trend is continuing in many sectors. If an organization fully eliminates the need for Z/OS by creating a new architecture built upon say a J2EE architecture, it is much easier to find system admins who can run non-mainframe system, and if there are no more legacy applications that need to be maintained, then a build-out approach usually generates the lower TCO.

One of the main hindrances to leaving the mainframe up until this point has been one of Quality of Server. Traditionally, nothing could compare to the reliability and throughput of the mainframe. However, times have now changed. From the perspective of availability and reliability, products like Oracle’s Real Application Clusters can provide the availability off the mainframe across the computing grid. So, now with the off-mainframe option being able to deliver mainframe quality of service, we are seeing a larger push for this path.

Another push to get off the mainframe is when the organization faces a “burning-platform” situation. The mainframe system they are running is out of support, or coming off support in the near future. So, now we are again confronted with the actual problem of how to migrate off the platform.

Create a flexible, adaptable and 100% agile architecture
The idea of re-architecture implies that the system will be totally different from the original. Just as ain any ground up development effort, here we are looking to leverage the latest in technologies and development frameworks. The objective here isn’t to refactor, or remediate the legacy code and redeploy it in a polished up mode, but rather totally change the make up of the entire system. The only resemblance of the original is that we’ve leveraged the original business rules (that we desires) as well as legacy data, which has also probably been restructured as well.

The point here is the a modernization effort that is only doing a refactoring of legacy structure, but not leverage any new technologies or delivery platforms is probably not a true re-architecture. For example, let’s thing about an average Cobol program. Say this program is 50,000 lines long, does some data interaction, screen inputs, program calls and cleanup. It also probably contains some dead code, and code that was not very well written. The idea leveraging new technologies, would take this beyond transforming this simply into Java. I would even argue, that cleaning up the dead code, and abstracting data an screen logic isn’t enough. A true re-architecutre will examine the function of this code base. Determine things like if it is doing event orchestration, or business rule execution. If so, it would probably not be a good candidate for POJO (Plane Old Java), but rather BPEL, ESB’s or a business rule engine.

Advanced Development Tools

With the recent push of the open systems movement, there are a plethora of tools to enable organizations to develop and maintain applications. Users can take advantage of free IDE’s, open standard execution languages like BPEL and modeling languages like UML. With the pervasive and growing culture of open standards, this given the organization more choices. With choices comes competition of products and ideas. So, now, instead of only have one language, one set of tools and one cost model, we can utilize the growing and more efficient universe of Open Systems. Of course, it isn’t more efficient and cheaper by definition. We do need to apply thought and intelligence in how we choose to deploy. This is one of the compelling reasons for Re-architecture. We can now leverage a host of tools, environments and standards to take our legacy assets foreword into the futures.

Next Stop...REHOST vs RE-ARCH

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oracle BI and the Mainframe: Case Study

By Jason Williamson on March 18, 2009 2:17 PM

I am very excited about the recent press release done by our partner, DataDirect.
I worked on this project with them to integrate OBIEE with the legacy mainframe to IMS. This was a classic example of heterogeneous data sources that were giving reports 24 hours + old because you had to wait for the batch run, cram it into Excel, pull stuff from Oracle, Access and others. With Real Time data access, we were able to quickly stand up a great BI solution that was accessing mainframe data and integrate that with many (any) other data sources.

Here is the reprint of the PR.
State of Maryland Stays Ahead of Criminals with New Law Enforcement Dashboard from Oracle and DataDirect Technologies

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), today announced that the State of Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention (GOCCP) and Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) is using DataDirect® Shadow® with Oracle® Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition as an essential technology solution behind its Law Enforcement Dashboard.

Commissioned by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, the Law Enforcement Dashboard is used by the State of Maryland’s law-enforcement personnel and agencies to lookup the criminal history of defendants and offenders. Prior to the creation of the Dashboard, the state had separate databases for its Division of Corrections, Division of Parole, State Police Gun Registry and Sex Offender Registry – each with its own sign-on requirements and search criteria for information retrieval. This made cross-referencing systems and confirming identification and criminal history information a complex and time consuming task. Recognizing the existing infrastructure hindered the state’s law enforcement activities, Governor O’Malley directed the GOCCP to collaborate with the DPSCS to create a single view of people’s criminal backgrounds.

Because the State of Maryland’s law enforcement data exists across multiple databases and platforms, DPSCS sought a tool that would simplify the data mining and querying of each database. They chose the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition to provide the BI platform and Web portal for the Law Enforcement Dashboard. Secondly, they needed a middleware tool that could provide standards-based access to mainframe data in real-time as opposed to warehousing the data. DataDirect Shadow was selected because of its ability to provide direct SQL access to the data stored in legacy Information Management Systems (IMS) and Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) databases. DataDirect Shadow helped lower the latency time of the joint solution through its ability to transform non-relational mainframe data into a relational format compatible with the Oracle BI platform – thus eliminating the need for a data repository.

“We did not want to pull dedicated IT and development resources away from existing projects by requiring system owners to write interfaces or standard APIs for various applications,” said Ron Brothers, CIO of DPSCS’s Information Technology and Communications Division. “DataDirect Shadow allowed us to deal with multiple databases on multiple platforms in an easy and intuitive fashion. The low latency and high performance delivered by the Shadow product and the robust functionality of the Oracle BI platform helped reduce project costs and tap into the full potential of the information available.”

The foundation of the Law Enforcement Dashboard includes high performance, call-level interfaces to data on the mainframe and other databases that feed directly into the Oracle BI solution and Web portal. With DataDirect Shadow in place, the underlying mainframe-data mapping is transparent to the developer who simply codes standard SQL calls. Prior to the creation of the Law Enforcement Dashboard, response times for each queried database averaged upwards of six minutes. With the combined Oracle and DataDirect Technologies’ solution implemented, response time has dropped 90 percent, averaging just seconds, even though results are still coming from multiple databases across various state agencies and departments.

“By working together early in this project, Oracle and DataDirect Technologies were able to architect a solution that best met the State of Maryland’s business needs,” said Lance Knowlton, vice president of Oracle Modernization Solutions. “Data consolidation including real-time SQL access to mainframe assets using Oracle and DataDirect Shadow technology is a low-cost modernization solution with a quick time to market.”

“With the increasing role of IT in law enforcement and the considerable presence of mainframe systems in use, organizations are seeking innovative middleware technology to simplify the complexity of mainframe integration and make better use of existing assets,” said John Goodson, vice president and general manager of DataDirect Technologies. “The State of Maryland’s Law Enforcement Dashboard will undoubtedly be an example for other criminal justice organizations to follow. DataDirect is proud to have been involved with the project and in helping law enforcement analyze crime data in real-time to make better, informed decisions.”

DataDirect Technologies is a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, Oracle’s global business network of more than 20,000 companies who deliver innovative software solutions based on Oracle software.

About DataDirect Technologies

DataDirect Technologies is the software industry’s only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world’s most critical business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards. Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect® products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC™ and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS). For more information, visit www.datadirect.com.

DataDirect and Shadow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Tags:

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oracle BI and the Mainframe: A Case Study

By Jason Williamson on March 18, 2009 2:21 PM

I am very excited about the recent press release done by our partner, DataDirect.
Oracle Modernization recently worked with DataDirect and Md to integrate OBIEE with the legacy mainframe to IMS. This was a classic example of heterogeneous data sources that were giving reports 24 hours + old because you had to wait for the batch run, cram it into Excel, pull stuff from Oracle, Access and others. With Real Time data access, we were able to quickly stand up a great BI solution that was accessing mainframe data and integrate that with many (any) other data sources.