So You Think You Know Migration

Eight or nine years ago, there were few options for migrating orrenovating applications. CIOs could either re-build or replacesoftware systems, and either choice was extremely time-consuming andexpensive.

In 1992, Snap-On's Biland decided to get rid of the Cobol-based,homegrown IBMIBM mainframe applications that his company relied on andreplace them with a Baan platform. "We had green-screen terminals andnot a lot of functionality," Biland recalls. "The legacy applicationsdidn't give us the level of detail around inventory and transactiondata that we needed." Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

Six years and millions of dollars later, the new platform was inplace.

Today, businesses have more options than replace or rebuild. There aretools that can do anything, from delving into legacy data, pluckingout relevant business rules and rewriting them in Java or XML, toattaching a Web front end on to an intact legacy database, andeverything in between. The tools are fast and relatively cheap,particularly compared with the cost of migrating an enterprise to anERP platform.