Ent Legacy Spl: Movers and packers

PUNE, INDIA: THE debate between legacy Vs New systems is an interesting one.

But the ‘interesting’ part evaporates as soon as a CIO decides to do a cut-over to a new system. And it’s definitely not a ‘switch-off’ to a ‘switch-on’ situation.

There’s historical data involved, there are mission critical functions typically associated with legacy systems to be taken care of, downtime risks are high and plus there are many other ‘slips between the cup and the lip’.

The situation, of course, gets accentuated as most Legacy Information Systems are mission-critical and if one of these systems stops working the business may grind to a halt. Decommissioning then gives over readily to Legacy System Migration. But then is it as easy as it sounds?

For Arun Jain, director, Premium Bars, a manufacturer of TMT steel bars that produces over 450 tonnes of steel per day and has recently switched from a Tally legacy to a SAP BI environment, the peripheral issues were a highlight at the onset.

“I zeroed on the vendor after evaluating a number of software in the market. Most of them were not standard products and a few that were, turned out to be too expensive. Also other vendors did not have a good base. We wanted a good sales service back-up and the partner back-up by SAP was a good point."

It’s true that ‘How long can an organizations based on, say, typically foxpro-based systems remain competitive’ asks Manjit Singh Bimra, deputy general manager IT, Information Technology Center, Tractor Engineers Ltd (L&T Group) when he talks about making data available Online, real-time and that too globally anywhere, anytime, with any device.

But migration is an important spotlight.

“Large Organizations should carry out migration or Upgrade in a phased manner strategically without affecting business,” he says.

Coming to the rationale of going in for a phased implementation, Muthukrishnan G, chief manager - IT, Madras Cements tells that during the migration to an E-suite at his organization, the testing and integration part was important and thus it was necessary to move in a phased manner.

“We were moving from a previous version to the next one of an existing solution. We completed the web-enabled deployment in six months.”

For Muthukrishnan, most of the migration went well but equipping the users well and taking care of familiarity issues was an area that could have done better.

According to Ajit Sathe, head, Sales, APAC, Quinnox Consultancy that offers IT lifecycle solutions, moving over to new system and specially the data part is something that is a significant area.

“One has to carefully consider how much data lies before, how much is it integrated, how much of it is in silos, how much of it is clean and portable etc. All this should be sorted out before moving to a new system.”

Other experts point out that migration should cover as minimal downtime as possible.

In the views of Yogesh Agrawal, Vice President, CommandCentral Product Group Symantec Corporation, there are issues around old, new and cross-platforms to be taken care of. Inefficiencies, as he sees it, definitely exist, be it over investing in some areas or under investing in others.

“Migration should be efficient and just how smart it is varies from case to case. It could be in the form of only necessary blocks, complete cross-over etc. Mostly it depends on tools and partners. There is a lot of room to optimize migration.”

And this can be done with methods like categorization of mission-critical and non-mission-critical apps, proper prioritization, DR planning etc, as he adds.

So should a CIO go full-throttle with a legacy migration or do it in a piecemeal approach?

Different schools of thought stay. Some propose rewriting a legacy system from scratch so as to create a functionally equivalent information system based on modern software techniques and hardware. However this one comes with a high risk of failure associated with any large software; interoperability needs between legacy and target systems as well as complexity and technical hassles.

Another genre advocates automated migration tools to ease the complexity and technical challenges and companies such as Anubex, ArtinSoft, FreeSoft, and Relativity Technologies have been pitching them for long.

These tools work by converting legacy code into modern languages, while promising suave functionality and lower development costs. SOA kind of concepts break up a legacy system's business fabric into components that can be rewired as per new business needs.

Clearly defined application-programming interfaces (APIs) also come into play here.

Internet-enabled Screen scrapers like Flashpoint, Mozart, and ESL are some more ways as cited by experts.

Being non-intrusive is their plus point but scalability is a downside due to inadequacy on the part of legacy systems to talk smoothly with modern Internet-based platforms.

Legacy wrapping, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) frameworks, are some more techniques while modern, packaged software and hardware from ERP vendors, is gaining ground too.

As to what works best for a company, it’s again ‘horses for courses’.

Do you have anything to comment about migration issues or techniques?