A legacy migration process represents a massive, long term business investment. As the name Legacy Migration Solutions implies, the focus for nearly two decades centers exclusively on the design and creation of reengineering tools for the purpose of transforming complete legacy applications. From platform migration to language and database transformation, the available suite of legacy migration tools in the market has solved reengineering challenges for a wide spectrum of platform and operating system environments.
Several options exist for legacy migration systems, defined as any monolithic information system that is too difficult and expensive to modify to meet new and constantly changing business requirements. Legacy Migration Techniques range from quick fixes such as screen scraping and legacy wrapping to permanent, but more complex, solutions such as automated legacy migration or replacing the system with a packaged product.
Debate on Legacy Migration can be traced more than a decade, when reengineering experts argued whether it was best to migrate a large, mission critical information system piecemeal or all at once. Legacy Migration can create a functionally equivalent information system based on modern software techniques and hardware. But the high risk of failure associated with any large software project lessens the chances of success.
Many legacy migration projects failed because of the lack of mature automated legacy migration tools to ease the complexity and technical challenges. That started to change in the mid 1990s with the availability of legacy migration tools from some companies with advanced technology. These legacy migration tools not only convert legacy code into modern languages, but, in doing so, also provide access to an array of commercially available components that provide sophisticated functionality and reduce development costs.
The Internet is often the driving force behind Legacy Migration today. The Web can save an organization time and money by delivering to customers and partners business processes and information locked within a legacy system. The approach used in accessing back office functionality will depend on how much of the system needs to be Internet enabled. Another option of Legacy Migration is replacing an older information system with modern.
Legacy Migration is one of the most difficult challenges we face today. Constant technological change often weakens the business value of legacy systems, which have been developed over the years through huge investments. IT people struggle with the problem of migrating these systems while keeping their functionality intact. Despite their obsolescence, legacy systems continue to provide a competitive advantage through supporting unique business processes and containing invaluable knowledge and historical data.