Legacy Migration Strategies

The late 1970's and 1980's led to a renaissance in the IT industry.  Real time Online Transaction Processing Systems began to dominate virtually every industry.  Telecommunications Operations Support Systems (OSS), Banking Systems and Accounting Systems were migrated from traditional batch mode to provide real time, online data services required for day to day operations.  Many of these systems continue to operate well past their anticipated useful lives.

Why?

Through years of continuous refinement and enhancement existing systems have grown to define the business which they were initially designed to support.  The original development budgets have long since dried up and maintenance is either non-existent or based on emergency needs (Y2K).  While this period did breed the current stable of standardized interfaces and protocols the systems built during this period did not, by and large, employ the standards which they helped to define.

Migration becomes a euphemism for replacement!

Replacement includes: hardware, software and process.  It is little wonder that many of these migration projects either fail or produce new systems with diminished capacity.  Complaints of "the system is down", or "I don't know the new system" are a defining aspect of our current business culture.

Modern computers, with their low cost and high speed, certainly have the 'horsepower' to replace older systems.  Current development paradigms while not necessarily advancing the art and science of application development are certainly moving sideways at great speed.  Turnkey solutions abound in virtually every market segment.  Yet replacing legacy applications remains a difficult process.

Why?

Hardware and software are rarely the problem.  Process is the key.  Replacing legacy systems is as much a cultural revolution as a technical one.  New systems must, either through advanced functionality or ease of use,  sell themselves to users.  Roll out must be staged and each stage targeted at a specific set of users.  Feedback from each set of users must be reflected in each subsequent release.  Putting the end user first will provide the cultural imperative required to assure success.

Of course nothing is free.  A staged rollout implies significant technical complexity.  Fortunately technical issues are the realm of a small group of trained professionals.  Given the proper tools and a migration plan that 'makes sense' technical problems are typically the easiest to overcome. 

At LNX Alliance Inc. we have engineering staff with experience in planning and implementing large scale application migration projects. Our experienced engineers work with your team to to define the migration path from a process perspective and the necessary technical details required for the completed project.

We have provided lead engineers on several multi million dollar migration projects.  For further information do not hesitate to contact sales@lnxalliance.com.


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