Our Automated CA Telon Refactoring solution delivers modern Cloud-enabled applications and databases that are functionally equivalent to their legacy counterparts, eliminating the hassle and expense of CA Telon and the mainframe. This reduces cost, allows for deeper integration, and enables customization to meet business requirements.
CHALLENGES
Developers who understand CA Telon and mainframe technology are reaching retirement age and no one is being trained to replace them, resulting in a steadily diminishing talent pool. As this shortage grows, the costs and risk of relying on CA Telon will continue to rise.
Mainframes running CA Telon cost as much as 4,500 per cent more to operate than equivalent Cloud counterparts. This quandary is compounded by CA Telon's rising licensing and maintenance fees.
Companies are rapidly moving to modern environments and practices such as DevOps and the Cloud. CA Telon and the underlying systems that support it were not designed for modern IT, resulting in difficult integrations and limited flexibility.
OUR SOLUTION
Our Automated CA Telon Refactoring solution preserves the benefits of legacy systems while empowering organizations to leverage the advantages of newer platforms, especially the Cloud. This unlocks a whole new world of quality and scalability from automated testing, to quality assurance, and the ability to leverage containerized deployments and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes.
We use proprietary automated tooling to ensure all business rules and functionality are preserved, then extrapolate the CA Telon-generated source into an intermediate state. This streamlines the code base and removes any dependencies on CA Telon-specific libraries or runtime routines. It optimizes the application for the process of automated refactoring to object-oriented Java or C#.
After go-live, Java and C# developers can extend application functionality for Cloud optimization using standard DevOps tools and CI/CD concepts that simply aren’t available for mainframe applications. Object-oriented application architectures conform to web-centric requirements and will run on any Java application server (i.e. WebSphere, WebLogic, Apache Tomcat, etc.) or on Microsoft IIS when the target language is C#. Precious business logic from the legacy system is preserved, while levels of optimization can be applied to deliver efficiencies and business benefits such as elasticity, granular service definition, and easy integration with Cloud-native services.
Refactoring a fourth-generation language like CA Telon to object-oriented Java or C# presents many challenges. As such, our Automated CA Telon Refactoring process was designed with the following requirements in mind:
OUR PROCESS
We begin 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 we recommend optimal modernization approaches based on information gathered, as well as rough order of magnitude (ROM) pricing, and estimated project durations and resource requirements.
The assess and design phase is performed using our 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 CA Telon refactoring activities, the database and data modernization, and build-out of the target operating environment. During transform, we refactor pre-defined work packets, perform functional tests, and deliver them into the DevOps pipeline. While customer teams build, test, and deploy these work packets in the target environment, we refactor the next work packet, iterating until the entire mainframe estate has been transformed.
The test and deploy phase begins with the receipt of work packets through the DevOps toolchain as they are delivered from iterative refactoring activities in the transform phase. If issues arise, the work packet is passed back to us 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 refactored estate has been deployed.
Prior to go-live, we refresh 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 automated refactoring tools and not the refactored code, this final refresh can be delivered into production over a weekend, eliminating code freezes.
We work closely with you and your team to ensure a smooth transition into production. 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. We also provide on-demand assistance during the warranty period following production deployment, as well as post-transformation support of the modernized application.
"We could not be happier with the Advanced team. They have done all that we’ve asked and more to make sure things have gone smoothly."
Carl Allen, Technical Architect,
Companies House
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Over 35 years of CA Telon and mainframe modernization experience
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