by Andy Pritchard, Director of Technology Strategy at Devoteam UK
I was delighted to be asked by our Swiss team to present at their RedHat Forum in Geneva on the subject of Application Migration and Modernisation (AMM) in the context of enterprise integration.
This subject aligns both with RedHat’s own positioning and one of our go to market offers around helping customers migrate off legacy platforms onto more modern future-proof platforms with as little risk as possible. It’s this part that I will expand on in this blog to help outline the business value that can be derived from embarking on what might seem to a lot of customers like a daunting journey fraught with risk and ultimately a cost which needs to be justified.
What do we mean by AMM?
AMM as a concept is not new to RedHat; they have been helping organisations derive value from migrating legacy application server technologies to more modern platforms for a while now and have a very well understood methodology for doing this. Let’s examine the underlying principles.
Enterprise integration platforms have underpinned business critical applications and processes for many years. As a result, people are reluctant to change them. Eventually the applications themselves become more and more legacy and, though well understood, become costly and time-consuming to change and maintain. If we add to that the recent acceleration of change in technology and, dare I say it, digital transformation and the need for businesses to be more agile to keep pace with the competition, then the interactions with the functionality these platforms expose has had to change significantly between large systems as well as between applications within the data centre, to a more enhanced and outward interaction driven primarily by the rise of IOT, mobile and web. Such change may also embrace system integration across the organisation, the cloud, hosted platforms and applications, with issues for all around performance and security.
So, given how critical integration is to the business and how cumbersome, slow and costly the changes to traditional integration technologies and patterns are, we need to think about how we can develop integration as function and leverage this in a more agile and modern way, unlocking legacy to provide a more efficient IT.
We are modernising these integrations by applying architectures, principles and techniques such as API First, Microservices, and containers to be able to re-factor, decompose and break up the traditional monolithic architectures and deliver all of this using DevOps principles to increase further our ability to provide better quality software faster.
What are the drivers?
One of Devoteam’s core aims is to help our customers achieve a more efficient IT. By that we mean remove as much cost (time and resource) as we can from ‘keeping the lights on’ and make room for innovation to help really drive business value through agility. In the context of AMM, the costs we are talking about removing are around expensive enterprise licensing models and the support and maintenance that goes with it. To go further, by introducing more modern container and cloud-based platforms such as RedHat’s JBOSS Fuse, we can remove cost from hardware spend by being able to do more with less because the platform itself is set up to be auto-scaling, highly available and fault tolerant. In other platforms this would mean a large outlay on much underutilised hardware to support those non-functional requirements. And if we add DevOps as a vehicle for delivery and apply automation throughout the entire software cycle, we can further reduce overheads while improving the cadence at which we can deliver and guarantee quality.
How Devoteam can help?
Devoteam provides smart tools and mature processes that enable efficient migration from TIBCO BW5 to Red Hat Fuse. The project involves the following:
- An introspection tool that reviews the existing landscape, gains insight into dependencies, and identifies code that can be automatically migrated versus manually upgraded. It highlights areas that can benefit from modernisation. This allows Devoteam to estimate the scope of the effort and develop a plan that is aligned to the customer business requirements;
- An automation tool that converts the most common TIBCO BW5 functionality to Red Hat Fuse;
- Creation of new components that redesign existing functionality to support new business processes.
The Devoteam migration service focuses on helping transform the organisation into one that can respond quickly to meet new and evolving business demands using a proven and low-risk approach.
To discuss how Devoteam can help your organisation migrate from legacy systems and modernise your estate, please contact us on uk.info@devoteam.com.