Advanced and Oracle share a rich, collaborative history with decades of experience and powerful tools, enabling intelligent modernization to Oracle Cloud and beyond. Our turnkey migration solutions maximize the power and flexibility of Oracle in the environment that suits you best.
BENEFITS
Most enterprise applications applications were designed to run best on scale-up architectures that prioritize ultra-low latency networks, persistent database connections, and resource clustering for availability. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was designed to address these requirements.
Human error leads to misconfiguration which can rob an application of its performance, while misapplied security patches can expose the ecosystem to vulnerabilities. Autonomous Services automate the patching and performance tuning of the operating system and the database, reducing risk.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure designed security into the core experience from the start of your application build or migration, and made most of their security tooling free as part of your environment.
MODERNIZATION IN ACTION
OUR SOLUTIONS
Our modernization experts work with you to assess, document, and understand your legacy estate. These assessments are performed using ModPaaS as part of our Assessment services with the goal of developing a complete understanding of the application, infrastructure, and operational components of your mainframe environment. It often exposes mainframe artifacts you aren't aware of, relationships you do not realize exist, and assets that are no longer in use. An Assessment provides you and your stakeholders with valuable insight to inform application modernization decisions such as disposition strategies and target environment architectures. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them.
In some cases, the optimal path to unlock the power of Oracle is through data modernization. Our Data Migration solutions enable a myriad of options depending on your needs. Replication allows you to retain your existing on-mainframe database in paralell with an Oracle database that synchronizes with the legacy DBMS.
Conversely, full data migrations to Oracle can target a variety of destinations including on-premises, Oracle Cloud, Oracle Database Service for Azure, other popular cloud platforms, or hybrid deployments. Regardless of the source or destination, the data itself remains private throughout the migration process ensuring adherence to even the most stringent compliance requirements.
Rehosting is ideal for companies whose applications are still meeting their business needs, and who therefore wish to retain their core application development skills while moving away from legacy databases and expensive mainframe infrastructure. Our Rehosting solutions combine the industry’s best software platforms (such as Application Transparency Platform (ATP) and Oracle Tuxedo ART) with proven application refactoring, consolidation, and data migration services to ensure your entire mainframe estate is deployed to the target environment in the languages and database models you need.
With Rehosting, application source code is migrated without change while the legacy database is migrated to Oracle and configured to seamlessly interact with your applications via the rehosting software.
Our Automated Refactoring solution provides a turnkey modernization of your procedural codebase (or 4GL) to object-oriented Java and migration of your legacy database to a relational model, all deployed to Oracle Cloud so you can retire the mainframe. As the steward and leading contributor to the Java platform, Oracle continues to drive its evolution in response to the demands of the enterprise and provide unparalleled support to developers.
Many code transformation solutions create structurally similar programs in the target language, but require additional re-engineering efforts to yield desired results. Our solution is completely automated, removing the risk associated with the post-refactoring tweaks that are part of other offerings.
Re-Engineering options allow for the use of most modern technologies, newer design patterns and improved business logic or removal of residual application source code. This modernization path is best pursued with the visibility, program flows, reporting, and documentation available with ModPaaS, but it can include Automated Refactoring of select subsets of code, Application Consolidation for workloads that may remain on the mainframe, and Data Migration to relational models such as Oracle.
OUR PROCESS
Advanced begins every modernization initiative with a discovery, free of charge. Our modernization experts work with you to understand and document your business and technical goals and objectives. Together, we gather information about your mainframe estate. Everything from infrastructure to language and database types and quantities are accounted for. The discovery concludes with a workshop where Advanced recommends optimal Oracle solutions based on information gathered, as well as rough order of magnitude (ROM) pricing, estimated project durations and resource requirements.
The assess and design phase is performed using Advanced’s automated tools to fully catalog and develop a complete understanding of the application, infrastructure, and operational components of a mainframe environment. It exposes mainframe artifacts that organizations did not know they had, relationships they did not realize existed, and assets that are no longer in use. Assess and design activities provide stakeholders with valuable insight to inform application modernization decisions such as disposition strategies and target environment architectures. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them. At the conclusion of the assess and design phase, all in-scope artifacts are accounted for, a detailed project plan is established, and the transformation process begins.
The transform phase includes the bulk of the Automated Refactoring and Rehosting activities, the database and data migration, and build-out of the target operating environment. During this phase, Advanced transforms pre-defined work packets, performs functional tests, and delivers them into the DevOps pipeline. While customer and partner teams build, test, and deploy these work packets, Advanced transforms the next work packet, iterating until the entire mainframe estate has been migrated.
The test and deploy phase begins with the receipt of work packets through the DevOps toolchain as they are delivered from iterative transformation activities in the previous phase. If issues arise, the work packet is passed back to Advanced where we review the code, adjust our tooling, reprocess the work packet, and send it back into the DevOps pipeline to resume testing and deployment. This process repeats until the entire modernized estate has been deployed.
Prior to go-live, Advanced refreshes the target environment by transforming a final snapshot of the mainframe environment to account for changes that have taken place throughout modernization project as part of normal business operations. Fortunately, since all adjustments and optimizations have been made to the tools and not the target codebase itself, this final refresh can be delivered into production over a weekend, eliminating code freezes.
Advanced works closely with Oracle, you, and your teams to ensure a smooth transition. Part of this transition includes the cooperative construction and testing of a go-live production cutover plan to reduce the potential risks associated with application deployments. Advanced also provides on-demand assistance during the warranty period following production deployment, as well as post-transformation support of the modernized application.
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