Why businesses need to take application modernization seriously

BANGALORE, INDIA: Identifying and addressing application modernization needs is a time-consuming chore for businesses. But that has worked to Dell's advantage as it efficiently hand-holds businesses in making them understand the nuances of application migration. Brandon Edenfield, executive director, Application Modernization, Dell Services, in an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL talks about the need for application modernisation especially with the advent of cloud and BYOD and how Dell is a strong services player too.

Brandon, who co-founded Clerity, an application modernisation company, joined Dell when the latter acquired it in April 2012. He now heads the company's Services portfolio, which has the IP from Dell's recent acquisitions such as Clerity, Make etc. Excerpts:

CIOL: Dell has been doing a lot of acquisitions in the last few years, especially in services space. How is Dell's outlook as a hardware company changing and how strong is it as a services player?

Brandon Edenfield: Prior to coming to Dell, I also had the same feeling. I have always known Dell in terms of the products advantage, however, I did not know that Dell has this level of service too. I was surprised to see that Dell had a very strong group of services people.

Everybody knew we created hardware boxes, did installations and things like that, however, they did not understand that Dell also did services. This is one of the best kept secrets out there. With the acquisitions, Dell made a good strategic decision to create a business that added significant value to customers to maximize cost efficiency and IT.

There are 50,000 people in Dell Services, spread all over the world. It is a multi-billion dollar ($8.4 billion) operation. I was once told, when I came to Dell, "You know we are big enough to be taken seriously, but small enough to actually care. We can still make the experience personal for the customer and we are still being innovative. We are not stuck in the same rut that you get when you are just so fixed on what you do."

Along with development and maintenance businesses, we also have specialized things such as security consulting, testing solutions, which is not just about development testing, but also application modernization testing. We also do portfolio rationalization, complete architecting solutions, re-hosting business that we do in application modernization and also business intelligence.

Customers are starting to see this. Dell is starting to do some more marketing to create more awareness. The only reason why Dell has not grown exponentially is because people have not been exposed to it.

CIOL: What are the particular challenges that enterprises face when it comes to application migration?

Brandon Edenfield: The first aspect that we find customer challenged is picking the right partner. There are a lot of companies out there that are offering application modernization, however, they have some assets that they are trying to protect. Dell has no legacy assets to protect, so decisions, expertise and recommendations we give are absolutely based on customer's needs.

Here, the customer has to decide what their real motivation is. Is it cost reduction? If it is, then what sort of solution base they can use. Or if it is business agility, which will require bigger investment?

CIOL: How can Dell help them?

Brandon Edenfield: We have over 300 customers running in 1,300 sites around the world. They are running enterprise work loads over 20 years in production.

It doesn't really matter which platforms companies have - modern or true legacy platforms such as IBM mainframe or any other. It also does not matter what they have written in their code interface, whether it is written by themselves or custom made to their applications, or have a hybrid cost application or a mix of all that. It does not really matter whether they have old legacy hierarchical data bases or newer technology.

We can add up infrastructure pieces together. While people spend time addressing application modernization needs, they forget about the impact of changing from one architectural legacy to the new architecture. Since we come from hardware background, we have the ability to understand it at its core level, along with operation, infrastructure and security.

Dell's global presence is an added advantage. We have distributed teams all over the world where we can maximize onshore and local resources in places like India and others. We are also getting creative with things such as transformational outsourcing, where Dell is using application modernization to change the game.

CIOL: Are you targeting IBM mainframes in particular?

Brandon Edenfield: Yes. IBM mainframe is one of our very biggest targets because of the costs associated with it. Customers spend up to 80 per cent of their IT budget on one platform. When your budget is stuck on that one platform, you are restricted on how you can grow and expand. Dell is trying to free them from that cost so they can apply that money in a more dynamic fashion to what they really want to do and not what they have to do.

We have internally transformed legacy environment to open systems, and even Unix. In India in particular we are seeing a tremendous opportunity in transitioning Unix systems into more agile environments, for strategic reason like cloud or mobility or to standardize platform. So we are seeing a lot of benefit in that area as well.

CIOL: What is the need for application modernization?

Brandon Edenfield: Applications modernization provides better agility for application with the ability to grow and adapt to new technologies better. It helps customers to take advantage of new technolgies such as cloud and mobility.

There are a couple of reasons why companies should go for application modernisation. Everybody is trying to maximize efficiency from a cost perspective. There are several costs associated with legacy systems. First, since proprietary architectures of hardware environment are not open, vendors can charge exponentially for the same hardware. For example, a source utility on a mainframe might cost five times as much as that same source utility on an x86. So, they are spending more for the same thing.

Second, these applications have been developed for so many years. So the cost of getting some of the resources and the risk of holding these resources for too long until they just become unavailable, along with disparate nature of such legacy applications, can be a danger to companies.

For example, a large company has acquired 10 companies over a period of time. Each of these 10 companies will have a new system. So they have to try and operate with all these disparate systems, as there is no good integration point.

So, companies are realising that they have to be more efficient by being more adaptive, lowering costs. And also because of the advent of new technologies such as cloud, where the actual compute is changing from let me buy this software and run it to let me start buying services, to let me start buying what I need as opposed to just go and buying a software package.

So, as people start to embrace cloud, bring own devices, and VDI, there is a strategic value to start looking at centralization. In order to do that you have to modernize applications into a framework that are applicable to these new technologies.

Moreover, cloud is a big game changer. Earlier, it was just thought as cost saving and customers were overlooking it. However, now it is really changing people's expectations on infrastructure and ability to work in virtualized frameworks. All that is happening on modern application environments and not on the legacy ones. So, if people want to keep up and stay in the game, they need to think about this now.

We have been doing this for 20 years and we have very large number of case studies to demonstrate that the customers who have done modernization with us can realize between 30 and 70 per cent cost savings over what it would cost to run their environment today.

CIOL: What would be the challenges that are in front of you?

Brandon Edenfield: If you had asked me that a year ago, I would probably have had an answer. However, now being in Dell, for every challenge that we have, we have a very strong executive team who are very dynamic and very quick to listen to things and react. So, if the challenge is to be put off, we have kind of resolved it.

IBM for example will change the cost structure of their application environment or their hardware environment to make it less competitive. However, we do not see that as a real challenge because there are so many third party software vendors out there. It is such a disparate market. There is no reason why we do that, or I just really think the challenges are getting there fast and efficient and continuing to differentiate ourselves, however, I really do not see any challenge about time and investment.