What does “modernization” actually mean for organizations seeking to transform mainframe applications, and why, until now, has it been so fraught with risk?

As an organization builds up a portfolio of applications to support its business, there is a need for modernization to be understood. As technological possibilities grow and business models change, the demands for modernizing a company’s IT infrastructure increase. But when it comes to modernizing mainframe environments, while “the corporate mind is willing”, often “the company flesh is weak”. Investments are sunk, applications work (albeit in standstill fashion), cost of modernization is too high and the risk of migration often considered too great.

A lot of this is due to the traditional modernization route of recompiling or re-writing applications – which is indeed fraught with risks if the source code is unavailable or isn’t easily identifiable.

There is another route to modernizing mainframe applications. With a software defined mainframe an organization can incrementally migrate applications to modern environments, as and when they need to, with no recompilation or data changes. Once in that environment they can work as normal and the organization can use modern development tools to modernize, test and deploy.

Read the white paper “A Graceful Path to Legacy Modernization” to learn about:

• The power of transforming mainframe application programs to new languages such as Java.
• The dangers of recompilation, re-writing and “Big Bang” approaches to modernization.
• Your opportunity to transform individual programs to new languages using the SDM, enabling a less risky, graceful modernization process.