Application Modernisation

The familiarity that most professionals will have with wrappering techniques, primarily used in the past for Web-enabling applications, makes this approach the most comfortable. It is, however, limiting in the long term and a decision will have to be made at some point as to a cleaner form of componentisation to reduce complexities of management.

Many of the problems associated with creating a componentised world out of procedural code have been overcome with the increased functionality of automated tools and the increase in understanding of requirements in terms of creating components based on a three-tier model, comprising common services, business logic, and presentation. Application Modernisation also allows the introduction of modelling tools into the new design frameworks; giving access to UML functionality that more closely aligns business requirements with development techniques.

One of the major barriers (both perceived and real to a greater or lesser extent) has been the disjoin between the relational data storage model and the pervasive world of objects with encapsulated data. This disjoin still exists but the gap between the two is narrowing all the time. All the major vendors in the RDBMS space and many of the transformation vendors are working to market viable solutions, and these are already starting to appear.

Market Issues

The majority of enterprises can no longer ignore the need to operate more cost-effectively; we are all expected to do far more, with far less. In almost all cases this results in reduced budgets and scaling back on available resource, with the added imperative of ensuring that the resource that remains must operate at high levels of performance and reliability. In application terms, this is a driver to acquire the tools and/or expertise to dependably maintain enterprise applications that might have grown with the business over the course of years.

However, these systems do not lend themselves well to modernisation, or to integration with agile business strategies. Although core business applications often pose these difficulties, the dichotomy being faced is that while some form of change management will be required to ensure that they enable the organisation to innovate with new services, those applications are still the lifeblood of the business.