Migrate or Modernize ? That is the Question

Key Considerations for Modernization or Migration

These elements help to determine whether one should modernize an old platform or migrate to another.

• Cost Constraints: Companies cannot afford to upgrade line-of-business software, like an ERP package, or raise annual maintenance costs.
• Aged Perception: One believes that green screen programs are either behind the times or outdated.
• Software Recommendations: Other on-site systems recommended for their fit with corporate operations are other software.
• Application Costs: Cloud is thought to offer a better route for cost control.
• Unsupported Applications: Because no version of their software package runs on newer operating system versions, companies cannot upgrade IBM i hardware.
• Inflexibility: Applications cannot allow necessary adjustments to business processes.
• Executive Decisions: A recently appointed CEO/CIO inexperienced with IBM i starts migration to another platform.
• Strategic Business Orientation: Migration to a cloud provider; Cloud is Strategic.
• Corporate Strategy: Current applications contradict corporate strategic direction.
• Hardware Affordability: Companies cannot afford to upgrade IBM i hardware.
• Integration Problems: IBM i apps are tough to link with more recent systems or technology.
• Developer Shortage: It is difficult to locate experienced developers, and enticing new ones presents challenges.
• Lack of IT Agility: The IT function lacks the agility to react to acceptable timeframe changes in products and marketing.
• Mergers and Acquisitions: A merger or acquisition by a bigger company drives a migration away from the IBM i.
• Perception of New: One assumes that more recent apps will be less expensive.
• Regulatory Demands: Government regulation and compliance demands application and infrastructure changes based on control and pressure.
• User Interface Demands: Users want a contemporary user interface that runs like online apps or a mobile phone.

These elements serve as accelerators for projects involving migration or upgrading. Decisions based on these elements alone are insufficient to ascertain the optimum result for the bottom line of the business. The incentive should set off a reasonable evaluation of possibilities to assist corporate needs for application upgrade.

One has to admit that for reasons like a merger, a decision can be mandated without proper thought.

Risks of Migration

Changing platforms does not come without danger. Here are typical questions IT asks during an evaluation:

• Do the hazards apply in your situation?
• Is it sensible to reduce risk? If yes, is mitigating’s cost reasonable?
• Are you ready to go ahead despite the hazards?

Key Issues to Consider

1. Embedded Business Rules Inside Current Applications: Business rules control how your apps validate data to guarantee invalid data does not find its way into the database. Learning the business principles of the new system and seeing the differences between the new software and current ones can help one migrate to new programs. When both the new and current systems control their rules outside with rule management software, business rule comparison is simpler. Many older programs, meanwhile, hard-code their business rules into their RPG or COBOL program. Finding the business rules calls for careful study of the source code over some period. Most likely, not all of the business rules found in current applications will show up in new ones and will have to be reproduced on the new system.

2. User Involvement: Business users have to take part in a migration project to offer professional advice on which current program features should be included in new ones. This helps to reduce their impatience and fatigue. Migration to a new platform runs the danger of taking more time than anticipated, which would irritate and tire business users operating on both old and new platforms throughout the transition.

3. Cost: While a migration project is among the more complex IT projects, most IT initiatives are underfunded. Determining the overall cost of migrating calls for comparing current expenses against those of the intended platform. Inaccurate projections and/or cost item omission will lead to the migration project exceeding budget.

4. Data Loss and Corruption: The most crucial component of any migratory operation is data migration. Data migrations away from IBM i call for EBCDIC data to ASCII data recoding. Matching data types between the new and current apps has to be exhaustive to prevent data corruption during data conversion. With repercussions including incapacity to trade and extra migration costs to fix the corrupted data, corrupted data in the new application threatens normal business operation.

5. Development Tools: On the new platform, developers might not be able to employ the same tools for development. By means of new tools, training and experience will increase the migration time and lower developer productivity. Many times, depending on consultants with development expertise on the new platform results in still another level of risk and expense.

6. Gap Analysis and Cost Estimating: Migration is a complicated operation for which the suitable tools might not be able to grasp the requirements of your application stack. Understanding the functional gap will help you to project migration costs and record the differences between supported platforms and corporate goals. Any current application calling IBM i operating system services calls for redesign, recoding, and testing for the functionalities the new operating system offers.

7. Integration: The difficulty of a migration project increases with the number of integration sites found in current systems. Moving all systems that interact with current applications could be impossible. Building new integration points into the new application is the necessary action.

8. Source Code Availability: Some packaged software does not give firms the source code of the used programs, compromising the analysis and comparison of the new and current applications. Lack of source code will cause an erroneous estimate for the migration and rapidly increases the failure risk.

9. Cloud Compatibility: Monolithic architectural apps do not meet the idea of native cloud applications. The cost of operation will be too high if current apps run differently from cloud operational limitations. Re-architecting current programs will increase the migration completion times.

10. Migration Tools: Automation tools for application migration are at hand. The danger is if the migration tools can transform the complete application. Should the tools cover only a portion of the migration, you have to create software to migrate what they cannot handle. Alternatively, users will need hand-made workarounds to complete tasks if you cannot reproduce specific corporate procedures.

11. ERP Software: Changing one ERP program to another is not an easy project. Starting from IBM i and moving to another server platform complicates the process even more. Business functionality offered by current application ERP systems could not be included in the new program. The procedures suggested by the new program might not fit present corporate operations. The migration runs the danger of failure or cost blow-out without careful study of the new program.

12. Training Costs: Training corporate users on the running of new applications results in training expenses as well as lost output in the regular workload. Although the new system aims to be more user-friendly, re-training is still a substantial expense (time and money) and has to be factored into the migration project.

Reasons One Should Think About Modernizing

Modernizing or migrating might be choices motivated by reality or impression. Existing programs either add value or utility for corporate operations. If yes, modernity has to be given thought.

Factors for Modernizing Applications

1. Build on Current Investment: Over the years, companies have heavily invested in IT assets that support corporate operations. While the applications may need upgrading to offer flexibility and modern features, modernization helps businesses to keep their current investments in infrastructure and apps intact.

2. Cost-Effective Training: Technical training for developers is less expensive than employing new staff, assuming staff is eager to learn, and the new skillsets aren’t too far from how they code now. While broadening developer skill sets with new technologies, modernization takes advantage of and preserves traditional skill sets.

3. Extend to Web and Mobile: Your application portfolio should not demand 5250 screens very often. At the very least, IBM i organizations can use tools that quickly translate 5250 data streams into HTML browser-based panels available for desktop or mobile viewing. Although screen scraping might not solve the tiresome navigation problems related to 5250 applications, at least the UI is something the present employees are familiar with. By creating new HTML displays that seem modern and are intuitive but call RPG/COBOL APIs to handle the heavy lifting, modernization can also leverage current apps.

4. Future Technology Integration: Modularizing current monolithic apps can help a corporation better incorporate future technology as needed.

5. User Interface Improvement: Add new user interfaces to current apps to make them modern and eliminate the impression of being out-of-date. By giving uniformity across all programs, cutting the number of displays needed to perform a task, using mobile device features, supporting touch screens, etc., you also help to improve the user experience. Modernizing initiatives that only take a 12-screen process and web-enabling them set up to fail since they don’t improve user experience. Once the novelty of having the application run in the browser fades, user complaints will start back up. Turning that 12-screen process into a 4-screen browser app will be much appreciated and widely accepted by end users.

6. Preserve Proven Business Logic: Current programs handle business operations and data integrity using business rules. Changing to another program calls for an examination of the corporate policies in the new one as well as the current programs. The study can take a lot of time and may not be comprehensive enough to find out whether the new package would enable company operations. Finding out after the migration there are no company policies is expensive. Modernizing current apps is more assured as you are developing on a tested and solid basis.

7. Modernizing Technologies: Several technologies offer IBM i application modernizing services. Refacing tools allow the user interface to be web-enabled with minimal effort and help to further enhance screens. Order entry into a new modern framework is one of the technologies that can modernize either entire applications or specific tasks. And there are tools that combine both, whereby businesses may swiftly release a contemporary application out the door by using refacing technology inside an existing modern architecture.

8. Use Linux and Open Source: IBM i has porting of many open-source apps and development tools running on Linux or AIX inside the PASE environment. Modernizing lets you keep current apps while adding fresh features used in Linux or AIX environments.

Conclusion :

Migration compels you to turn from old technology to new one and abandon priceless assets. That is a one-time leap from the current to the new. Modernizing makes use of current assets and offers a progressive shift to new technologies at a rate that meets your means of income and expenditure.