Mainframe Modernization

A Graceful Modernization Journey

Many companies seek to have their entire application portfolio based on modern languages or packages.

Where Legacy Applications are concerned, this involves converting individual programs from COBOL or PL/1 (and in some cases even more arcane languages) into modern languages such as Java. In so doing, an organization can tap into a vastly increased pool of development talent and tooling. Furthermore, the door to an entire world of Open-Source is opened, which alters the trajectory of application development for these hitherto legacy applications.

The Scale of the Modernization Challenge

Legacy business applications are a complex mix of programming languages, database models and computer hardware and software infrastructures. In many cases, these complexities have been in place for decades and an understanding of the finer points of their implementation is rapidly decreasing, if not already long gone. For many companies, source-code for some applications might not even be available.

The "All or Nothing" Challenge

In any application, the success of a modernization project depends upon the extent to which those components of the application that DO NOT need to be modernized, are forced to change along with their counterparts. Using conventional methods of modernization, this collateral effort is often so large that projects are never completed. At LzLabs, our modernization tooling and runtime environment solves this problem entirely.

With SDM a Journey of a Thousand Miles CAN Start with a Single Step

LzLabs application runtime environment enables seamless interoperability between migrated legacy programs, and their freshly modernized counterparts. Only the modernized program is changed, and LzLabs has specific tooling to enable the transcoding of specific programs into Java. The result is the opportunity to gracefully and incrementally modernize a legacy application, program by program. At no stage along the journey is the integrity and availability of the original application impacted – as would be the case in any big-bang modernization exercise.