SOA: A New Answer to the Legacy Challenge

Service-oriented architecture, neither fad nor cure-all, can offer huge business value in at least one unlikely place: your legacy assets.

Tue, December 06, 2005CIO

By Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmelzer

IT fads come and go, so-called paradigm shifts take place with annoying regularity, but legacy systems seem to stick around forever. What large company doesn’t have some important legacy application running on some aging piece of hardware, tucked away in their data center? Legacy comes in many forms: custom-coded applications with long-lost source code, unsupported packaged applications, or mainframe-based programs with proprietary interfaces. While these systems might be showing their age, there’s no arguing that they perform vital, often irreplaceable functions for the company. Legacy systems wouldn’t be such a cause for consternation, if it weren’t for the fact that so much business value resides on these systems—both in the form of essential data as well as critical business logic.

Nevertheless, business continues to require ever increasing levels of agility from the IT infrastructure. Competitive pressures, regulatory mandates and the unceasing search for greater business efficiency all drive IT to be better able to respond to a changing business environment. With every new technology endeavor, however, it seems that IT slips further away from meeting business imperatives. Something must be done! Rip and replace won’t work: It’s too expensive and risky. More middleware sure won’t help—who needs more glue for their glue? And simply throwing more applications or hardware at the problem isn’t going to solve anything—after all, the last thing we need is more legacy. What companies desperately need today is a new architectural approach for squeezing more value out of heterogeneous legacy resources, with enough agility to support an increasingly dynamic business environment. What companies need is service-oriented architecture.

Leveraging Legacy in SOA
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) attracts more than its fair share of hype. Such hype predictably leads to equal measure of anti-hype, which propounds that SOA paints a pretty picture, but once you roll up your sleeves and get into the dirty business of service-enabling legacy applications, you’ll find that the agility, reuse and efficiency benefits that SOA promises are forever out of reach, since services are simply interfaces to existing functionality. The truth, while less sensational, clearly lies between these two extremes.

In fact, there are three basic approaches for incorporating legacy applications into SOA implementations: accessing the data locked inside legacy systems directly, accessing business logic through APIs or other programmatic means, and emulating user interaction through terminal emulation, a.k.a. screen-scraping. As Joe Gentry, vice president of enterprise transaction systems at Software AG points out, “Legacy systems are still very prevalent. Today there are more than 200 billion lines of useful COBOL and other legacy code. Customers are looking for an adaptive approach for using legacy data directly, APIs, or going at screens.”


Loading...
Applications MarketSpace
Service Level Reporting and Communication
Service level reporting is the most visible output and often the most time-consuming activity in SLM. Learn more »
Lower IT Costs with Oracle Database 11g Release 2
Learn how upgrading to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 can transform your business, budgets, and service levels Learn more »
Managing Your SAP System
Learn how to more effectively manage your SAP system. Learn more »
 
SPONSORED LINKS
 

White Paper: 4 Customer Service Myths

White Paper: Improve Agility with Operational Responsiveness

Removing the Barriers to IT Governance: How On-Demand Software Changes the Game

Cloud Computing--Latest Buzzword or a Glimpse of the Future?

A Balanced Approach to an Application Development Platform

Adobe® LiveCycle®solutions for intuitive user experience

10 Ways Excel Drives More Value from Your SAP Investment

What's New in SOA Suite 11g?

Unleash the Power of Java with Oracle JRockit Real Time

SOA Best Practices and Design Patterns

Application Grid: Ideal Platform for IT Consolidation

Ready to virtualize tier one applications? Check your virtualization maturity.

Learn how to provide complete Business Service Management.

Increase ROI of Your Application Portfolio

See how AT&T can help protect your network.

Top Five CIO Challenges

Streamline IT Costs. Boost Performance with WAN Optimization.

Want to know how you can maximize employee productivity?

Build your 1st app FREE with Force.com

TDWI checklist helps define data readiness for analytics. Download report.

A new fleet of PCs with a total ROI in 10 months. Find your ROI.

eZine: A Roadmap to Reducing IT Complexity

Reduce risk, gain agility. See how Progress can help your business.

Virtualization Technology as a Business Solution

eZine: A Roadmap to Reducing IT Complexity

White Paper: Managed Security for a Not-So-Secure World

SharePoint - Unchecked growth of content is unsustainable.

Focus Under Pressure: Why IT Governance Becomes Mission-Critical in a Down Economy

Should Your Email Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis

Adobe® LiveCycle® solutions for business process automation

Architecting Business Intelligence Applications for Change: The Open Solution

Increase UPS efficiency without sacrificing protection.

Unlocking the Mainframe: Modernizing Legacy System to SOA

State of the Data Integration Market

Enhance Customer Loyalty through Higher Responsiveness

Achieving Business Agility with Application Grid

Seven Ways ITIL Can Help You in an Economic Downturn

Four steps to populate your CMDB.

"Enterprise-Proven" is the Prerequisite for Enterprise SaaS Portal Solutions

Join us at the US-Brazil IT-BPO Summit, on November 10th in New York.

Unified Communications: Thoughts, Strategies and Predictions. Join the discussion

Read the RSA report: Security for Business Innovation

Webcast: Looking to the Cloud for Email and Collaboration Services

64-page prescriptive guide to security, compliance, and IT operations.

Keep your IT expertise up to date. Join the Intel Premier IT Professionals.

A Clear View Toward Virtualization

Virtualization Technology as a Business Solution

The rules of infrastructure management just changed.

A Clear View Toward Virtualization

Interactive Q&A helps you discover key ways to maximize IT assets.

 
 
RESOURCE CENTER