Advanced recently completed the successful conversion of a large financial institution from ADSO to a modern platform. Here are your options - and best practices for your own ADSO migration success.
Spend a few minutes browsing automated conversion solutions online and you'll quickly realize that not all are created equal. The success of any ADSO conversion lies in a few key areas, each of which is relatively simple to ensure if you know what you're looking for.
ADSO Conversion: Define the Application today, Plan for Tomorrow
Most ADSO applications have been in place for decades. Most are based on aging development standards with limited functionality and usability. Despite their limitations, many are still relied on to provide mission-critical business functionality. Business challenges perpetuated by these legacy systems can include:
- Disjointed development and maintenance, leading to silo-based usage
- Maintenance and staffing costs are high and growing
- Compliance and regulatory challenges
- Limited functionality and integration of legacy ADSO applications limits innovation and growth
- Data-driven architecture makes business intelligence efforts either impossible or prohibitive
Conversely, it takes a flexible, nimble organization to compete in today's aggressive business landscape. Reliable technology that is scalable and integration-friendly for growth will dictate an organization's success.
Because ADSO applications were built in a different time, often to serve a single purpose, they rarely meet the criteria necessary to help an organization for the long-term. Its important to understand the specific impact of legacy systems on competitive advantage and business growth in the insurance vertical. For example, if DevOps adoption is a high priority for your organization, then choosing an ADSO conversion solution that is easily maintainable and extensible is of the utmost importance. DevOps looks to automation and ubiquity to speed processes on top of cross-functional communication, so honing the target environment to those standards is key.
Can you Cope with the ADSO Conversion Scope?
More often than you might think, an ADSO conversion creates structurally similar programs in a new language, but then needs additional re-engineering efforts to yield desired results. Scoping this additional work has widely been considered a risk factor associated with many automated conversion solutions on the market.
From state and local governments to worldwide corporations, ancient undocumented applications and disappearing resources are driving ADSO conversion like never before. Automated Conversion delivers a modern application and data tier with 100% like-for-like functionality as compared to the legacy ADSO application, based on fully maintainable open systems. However, caveat emptor. Before settling on an ADSO conversion, be sure that there is a robust legacy assessment and feedback loops in place to properly set the stage for future application development expectations up front, a complete elimination of any licensing fees, and no hidden re-engineering requirements that might cause scope creep and introduce risk after the ADSO conversion is complete.
A recent success story
Advanced completed the conversion of a large financial institution from IDMS/ADSO to Oracle and COBOL running on a Unix platform. The conversion involved 76,000+ components and 17 million lines of code. The new applications support over 1500 concurrent users and process over 3.5 million daily transactions. The applications have over 380 interfaces and 2000 screens. The performance was exceeded by 100% on Oracle.
If you're interested in modernizing your own ADSO applications, it's best to begin with an application assessment. Get in touch with us today to find out more.
