IT departments are turning to
service oriented architectures (SOA) and web services to extend
the life of their
mainframe applications, according to a study by Aberdeen
Group.
Of the 300 organisations surveyed for the analyst firm’s
Modernising Legacy Applications: Maximising the Investment report,
more than 90% said that modernising legacy applications was a
long-term, strategic initiative.
“IT is under intense pressure from business units to deliver
applications that provide new ways to look at old processes and
data,” said Perry Donham, director of enterprise integration
research at Aberdeen Group.
“We found that the companies that are keeping up with these
demands while lowering their overall costs for maintaining legacy
applications are leaving the applications in place and building
services-based interfaces on top of the underlying packages and
data,” he added.
Companies that deploy services layers on the mainframe to expose
legacy packages typically achieve a 60% reduction in the cost of
legacy application maintenance, versus an average 30% decrease from
other approaches, said the report.
However, Aberdeen group said business agility, not cost, was the
main driver for the most successful organisations that are working
on legacy modernisation projects.
The next step for your
mainframe >>
Analyst paper on the role of information in an SOA >>
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