MODERNIZATION PLATFORM AS A SERVICE

Mainframe Catalog

The first step of any modernization initiative, our Automated Assessment is performed using our automated tools to 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.

Our Modernization Platform as a Service (ModPaaS) is a purpose-built, customizable Cloud solution that allows you to perform a comprehensive assessment of your existing legacy applications. ModPaaS is available for customers seeking to analyze mainframe code, and to understand inter-relationships, complexity, dependencies, and business rules. These are essential components to successfully plan for any modernization project.

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Know the details, reduce the risk: How to begin your mainframe modernization journey 

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Why modernize?

CHALLENGES

Scarcity of domain expertise

Developers who understand mainframe technology are reaching retirement age and no one is trained to replace them, resulting in a steadily diminishing talent pool. As this shortage grows, the costs and risk of relying on the mainframe will continue to rise.

Limited flexibility

Companies are rapidly moving to modern environments and practices such as DevOps and the Cloud. The mainframe and its underpinnings were not designed for modern IT, resulting in difficult integrations and limited flexibility.

Exorbitant costs

Mainframes cost as much as 4,500 per cent more to operate than equivalent Cloud counterparts. This figure is compounded by rising licensing and maintenance fees for ancillary mainframe applications and databases. 

Modernization Platform as a Service (ModPaaS)

OUR SOFTWARE

ModPaaS allows you to perform a comprehensive assessment of your existing legacy applications, including asset count and asset type categorization, missing and unreferenced components, program flows, impact and code path analysis, reporting and documentation, and more. You can also trace and isolate business rules which can be reused for re-engineering initiatives.

ModPaaS also enables you to categorize objects and applications to determine feasibility of disposition options (e.g. rehosting, automated refactoring, re-engineering, replacement, retirement, etc.) and drive ongoing modernization initiatives with different levels of assistance. Once a disposition strategy is chosen, ModPaaS allows your team to develop a strategic modernization plan with our assistance which includes recommendations and estimates that best suit your needs. It then allows your teams to select and extract code to be modernized. For example, you can select code specific to the UI layer or data access objects to aid microservices development efforts.

ModPaaS-powered assessments

ModPaaS includes our Enterprise Application Viewer (eav), an automated assessment solution that has been used to process billions of lines of legacy code.

eav is a complete analytical team within a single tool. It provides both application and business teams with the ability to quickly understand and follow the logic within applications, between applications, and within programs. IT teams no longer need technical specialists for each application. A core team of programmers and analysts can debug, maintain, and enhance multiple complex applications within any environment.

It is also possible to predict the impact of specific changes using the integrated right-click tools, and reach documentation compliance by using the numerous reports generated by eav. eav takes the guesswork out of enhancement planning by providing full visibility into complex legacy applications, and can predict the impact of specific changes across the environment. Customers can visualize the impact of a change and predict its outcome with only minutes of effort.

The benefits of ModPaaS-powered assessments include:

Complete visibility into the legacy system: Assets loaded into ModPaaS are automatically parsed, counted, and categorized by asset type. Reports and documentation are automatically generated, and program interactions are created to represent the overall program flow, individual paragraph flow, and inter-relationships between the programs, data, and other component types.

Reduced application footprint: Results can be interactively analyzed to resolve assets flagged as missing, unused, or unreferenced. This is a critical task that reduces the cost, complexity, and risk of the future modernization project. Customers typically see scope reductions between 40 and 70 percent.

Global reports and documentation: Each time an asset is parsed, eav automatically updates its documentation repository, generating multiple reports which can be viewed / downloaded as PDFs or exported into a variety of formats (e.g. CSV, Excel, XML and DIF) for further manipulation.

Code clean-up: ModPaaS assists with the clean-up of code to make future maintenance more efficient.

Business rules mining: ModPaaS and eav assist with re-engineering initiatives such as the creation of microservices functionality by allowing you to mine mainframe business rules from within application logic. Select rules can be extracted from your code and saved as COBOL, then automatically converted to Java and C#, and further optimized and refactored as required.

Application categorization: ModPaaS bridges and processes the top-down results of an assessment with the bottom-up results of a technical assessment. This provides the ability to confirm, invalidate, or refine your target disposition strategies. Categories can be created for a single application, multiple applications, or even an identified subdomain following a service modelling exercise.

ModPaaS is available for download in most common Cloud providers' marketplaces (AWS, Azure, Oracle, and Google Cloud).

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Control project costs

The knowledge gained from using ModPaaS reduces the scope of existing applications and refines the modernization disposition strategy. Right-sizing these projects reduces costs too.

Relieve technical debt

We can streamline your code on three levels – source code file, paragraph / section, and by line – simplifying the maintenance of your applications.

Increase visibility

Full visibility, including business rules, reports, documentation, and application categorization, puts you in control of your IT estate while ensuring it supports your organization’s initiatives.

Additional resources to help you modernize

 
 

GUIDE

Modernization secrets of the Fortune 1000

This paper highlights the drivers to modernize, and profiles three global businesses who leveraged Advanced solutions for success.

Read guide

 

 

 
 

WHITEPAPER

Know the details, reduce the risk

This whitepaper details why a detailed assessment of legacy applications and databases is essential for risk mitigation prior to any modernization effort.

Read whitepaper

 

 

 
 

REPORT

2022 Mainframe Modernization Report

Exploring the impact of the new era of digitalization and change on the current state of legacy systems and organizations' modernization plans.

Read report

 

 

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Dec 02, 2022 by Tim Jones, Managing Director of Application Modernization, Advanced

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Oct 21, 2022 by Tim Jones, Managing Director of Application Modernization, Advanced

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Jun 10, 2022 by Rob Anderson, Vice President of Marketing and Product, Advanced