There’s a word that crops up more and more in the modernization community: refactoring. When a customer realizes that doing a wholesale line-by-line translation of an entire application results in duplicating the old application structure in Java or .NET, they understand that what’s a good structure for the mainframe is NOT a good structure for modern web applications. When they ask about this, some vendors say, “Oh,...

We get a lot of requests for a demo. And there are a lot of vendors who will demo “at the drop of a hat”. It’s even possible, and reasonable, for the vendor to record that kind of demo and make it available to run anytime. After all, a canned demo is a canned demo — so there’s no real difference between a recorded one and a live one. Over a Webex, you don’t have the opportunity to look under the covers...

Some legacy system owners are suffering from license fee increases of 20% per year, and this is fueling renewed interest in modernization. In the past, there have been a number of vendors whose proprietary software product (or company) has been bought by a large firm whose clear intent is to keep raising the license fees until the last customer is driven away. For a long time, COBOL was thought to be immune to this kind of price increase. After...

Maintainable code: everybody wants it, very few modernization customers get it. But rigorously defining what is maintainable code is somewhat difficult. However, there are some good guidelines to go by: 1. Maintainable code for web business systems does NOT have the same structure as your legacy mainframe programs. In Natural and COBOL and MAPPER, for example, it is possible to mix the business logic in with the presentation or view (the screens...

A friend sent me an article the other day. The intro says, “States’ shrinking IT workforce: The worst is yet to come: A survey by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers finds that states are facing critical shortages of IT workers, made worse by furloughs, hiring freezes and stagnant salaries. And the retirements of many older workers loom.” Of course, the big impact of this situation is on the ability of...