Application Modernization

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OVERVIEW... 

With the advance of e-business, IT organizations confront a number of challenges, in particular:

  • Managing multi-platform application environments, and
  • Developing new application management skills.

Application modernization is an obligatory transition for all companies that wish to keep their competitive standing by ensuring the longevity of their information systems. Modernization presupposes an ability to rapidly adapt the company’s main applications to new technologies, and open them up to new market standards.

The stakes are even higher when we consider that companies must continually improve their applications to stay ahead of the competition, while maintaining their existing system. The system already in place contains the company’s business rules. This legacy is vital to the company’s business activities and represents a sizeable investment. Rewriting the entire system would be far too expensive and time consuming.
In this climate of sweeping change, IT directors need to know how to work with new technologies while staying true to the spirit of existing legacy applications. This is where ARCAD comes in.

Diverse Environments
Naturally, new technologies will link up with existing databases and processes. Any changes in one or the other can have a big impact on peripheral functions.

  • How can you see all these links?
  • How can you transfer these diverse components to production in a synchronized manner?.
     

THE ARCAD APPROACH...

You will find the answers to these pressing questions in the ARCAD-Open Repository core and in the ARCAD-Skipper suite. Open Repository gives an overall view of an application, whether it is built from native components or components from other systems (Windows, Linux, or UNIX). It catalogues all the inter-relationships between these applications. ARCAD-Skipper manages the entire change cycle, including synchronized deployment on heterogeneous servers.

Modernizing your native IBM i applications means making technical choices that will be around years down the road. Whatever strategy you implement, you will encounter four major concerns:

  • Gaining a clear and accurate view of existing applications,
  • Maintaining stability of your information system despite these far-reaching changes,
  • Conserving your teams’ unity and productivity,
  • Keeping track of the resulting increased system complexity.

To address these issues, you need to get a handle on the following stages of the modernization process:

  • Auditing existing applications,
  • Rationalizing applications,
  • Documenting business rules,
  • Using your database architecture to design new models,
  • Migrating RPG code to more recent versions,
  • Merging development environments (native, Java),
  • Defining a common methodology for development management.

Sharing Skills
When new skills are needed, new resources are usually close behind. The question becomes how to transfer functional knowledge of existing applications to a new population – especially since this knowledge is often stored only in the heads of existing teams. How does an organization accomplish this task as simply and as quickly as possible?

You can rely on ARCAD-Observer to automatically generate and update your technical documentation, including:

  • Data models,
  • Flowcharts,
  • Program structure charts,
  • Program calling chains,
  • Workflow diagrams,
  • Cross references.

In addition, ARCAD lets you centralize existing functional elements in a single place, and enhance this documentation with information entered by developers. The results are produced in HTML format for easy information sharing.  

ADVANTAGES...

ARCAD-Skipper offers security in multi-platform development, while ARCAD-Observer enables rapid comprehension and sharing of information system knowledge.
To find out more, please check out our complete overview of application modernization