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Tag: legacy systems

  • Download Rocket Open Source Languages for z/OS Today!

    Download Rocket Open Source Languages for z/OS Today!

    Empower your developers to use their preferred open source languages. We offer many open source languages and tools—including Git, R and Python—that allow any developer to harness the power of the mainframe without spending months learning new skills.

    Git
    Git is a version control system (VCS) for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. It is primarily used for software development, but it can be used to keep track of changes in any files. The z/OS port of git supports automatic tagging and conversion of text files between ISO8859-1 (ASCII) and IBM-1047 (EBCDIC) character encodings.

    Bash
    Bash is an sh-compatible shell that gives users a command-line interpreter through a traditional interface via text window and a script execution capability. It is the default shell on Linux and Mac OS X.

    Bison
    Bison is a programming utility for creating parsers. It’s commonly used in both build automation and build automation generation, and converts annotated context-free grammar into a C, C++ or Java parser. Bison is used by PHP, Bash, Ruby and many other languages and tools.

    bzip2
    bzip2 is a data compressor for single files (it is not a file archiver). It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best-available techniques of statistical compressors at rates approximately twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression. This version of bzip2 was not written to exploit z Systems architecture; Gzip may work best for these needs.

    cURL
    cURL is an open source tool that can transfer data to and from servers using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, TFTP, DICT, TELNET, LDAP or FILE). This tool can work without user interaction. cURL functionality includes proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer, resume and more.

    Diffutils
    Diffutils is a package of several programs intended to find differences between files. The diff command, for example, shows exact line differences between two files.

    Gzip
    Gzip is a popular data compression/decompression program (our ported tools have been compressed using this utility). This version of Gzip has also been modified to exploit z/OS EDC compression hardware, if present on your system.

    libssh2
    libssh2 is a software library that allows developers to use the SSH-2 network protocol in an easy-to-use, self-contained package. This package only contains LIBSSH2 libraries intended for use by other programs or utilities.

    m4
    M4 is a general-purpose macro processor. Most users require M4 simply as a dependency of Autoconf or Bison, although the language is used in other contexts such as text template re-use, text editing and text-processing applications.

    Make
    Make controls the generation of program executables and other non-source files from the program’s source files. Make allows users to build, install and update packages without knowing the process details.

    Mktemp
    The mktemp utility takes a given filename template and overwrites a portion of it to create a unique filename. Mktemp also manages the creation of temporary files and directories that allow the user to avoid cleaning up files that are not needed permanently.

    OpenSSL
    OpenSSL is a software library used in applications that need to secure communications against eavesdropping or need to ascertain the identity of the party at the other end.

    Pkg-Config
    pkg-Config is a programming tool that assists with compiling applications and libraries. It helps you insert the correct compiler options on the command line without the need for hard-coding values on where to find glib (or other libraries).

    Sed
    sed (stream editor) is a utility for parsing and transforming text. It is typically used for extracting part of a file using pattern matching, or substituting multiple occurrences of a string within a file.

    sudo
    sudo is a command-line utility that allows admins to delegate authority, giving certain users the ability to run commands as a super-user or as another user, while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.

    Unzip
    UnZip is an extraction utility for archives compressed in .zip format. Unzip is also compatible with PKZIP and PKUNZIP utilities for MS-DOS as well as Info-ZIP’s and supports bzip2 compression methods, as well.

    Vim
    Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient.

    Zip
    Zip is a compression and file packaging/archive utility. Zip puts one or more compressed files into a single ZIP archive, along with information about the files.

    zlib
    zlib is a general-purpose, lossless data compression library providing in-memory compression and decompression functions, including integrity checks of the uncompressed data.

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  • Taking the Fear Out of Legacy Modernization

    Taking the Fear Out of Legacy Modernization

    Once a cutting edge and golden standard of technology, legacy-based monolithic applications have become a big burden for many organizations. While pivotal in supporting business functions, they have and will continue to lose the flexibility and overall usability required to be successful in today’s competitive digital and agile business landscape.

    But for most businesses, and especially the Fortune 1000s, looking to streamline their services and improve overall functionality, the prospect of breaking away from these systems is often seen as a double-edged sword. Ridding themselves of brittle, complex and tightly integrated technology, on one hand, can provide the right environment to introduce newer software. This can help elevate their businesses to be nimbler, more innovative and productive, ultimately driving better experiences and increased revenue. On the other hand, though, maintaining them can be viewed as the safer option that doesn’t include the fear of lost business intelligence, downtime for consumers and the biggest of all, an exorbitant cost that they simply can’t justify.

    What’s important for them to realize is these modernization efforts don’t always require a complete overhaul or significant downtime to operations from rearchitecting or reengineering their applications. In fact, any organization in need of change can choose from a variety of alternative modernization processes that best suit their needs.

    Below is a closer look at those opportunities and success stories from BBVA, Companies House and MTA after implementation.

    Automated Conversion

    With many large financial institutions, for instance, they are often running mission-critical applications and processes on their legacy systems that reduce their ability to meet the demand of modern business processes. As they look to reduce costs, enable data and business process integration to better navigate an increasingly global banking landscape, legacy modernization is top of mind. To make necessary changes and continue business as usual, one of the best strategies could be automated conversion.

    By utilizing the necessary tools, an organization can produce a revitalized version of their legacy system in a new environment in a modern code, such as Java or C#. Through this process, once an application and/or database is translated, developers are uniquely positioned to maintain business logic from their legacy system while extending application functionality and enabling enhanced integration capabilities for target databases. Because this approach is software-based, this modernization strategy is significantly less costly and can be completed in steps to minimize any interruption to business.

    In the case of BBVA, the second largest bank in Spain that operates in over 40 countries, the organization needed to reduce licensing costs of its mainframe and enhance its features, simultaneously freeing data trapped within its legacy system to enable these global operations. By pursuing an automated conversion to its systems, the bank was able to convert its code while taking total technical inventory, identifying key risk factors in its mainframe and ultimately removing significant amounts of dead code and approximately 38% of its programs.

    As a result of the reduced cost of its mainframe operations, the company achieved positive ROI of their transformation strategy within two years.

    Data Replication

    Fully rewriting applications can be time consuming, costly and risky, with the potential loss of vital information and processes. An alternative option to keep the legacy system fully intact while freeing essential data from its mainframe is data replication.

    Data replication allows an organization to replicate its mainframe and non-relational data through an entirely new, relational model. This allows the legacy system to continue with its standard functions, but automatically copy and convert data to the new model with a full replica of the legacy database, enabling greater visibility and flexibility for a business.

    This process was especially effective for Companies House, Britain’s government bureau that records and stores information on the country’s 1.8 million unique companies. Since the organization requires daily data updates because of the need for public access to this information, the organization couldn’t afford any downtime while modernizing. By replicating its data onto a relational model, the company was not only able to more seamlessly integrate its code into its target database, but more easily manage daily updates to its data–ultimately resulting in faster service for consumers and significantly reduced costs for the company.

    Batch Offloading

    Many legacy systems remain fully intact today because of their incredible ability to process vast amounts of data in a reliable and effective fashion. That said, as the amount of information within the system grows, so do the costs of maintaining these systems. For organizations with limited IT budgets and resources, the ideal approach lies in batch offloading.

    Batch offloading is often an easy first step in a modernization effort. This process requires an organization to convert one or more batch process applications to modern programming languages. By moving some of these processes off of the mainframe, organizations can future-proof their processes, maintain greater flexibility and reduce costs. These savings can also trickle down to the consumer, giving these organizations an edge against their competitors.

    For New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the organization aimed to move critical applications off its legacy mainframe to make way for refreshed, cost-effective platforms. By undertaking the batch offloading strategy, the MTA continued without any interruption or significant changes to its mainframe’s processes for users. The organization was able to reduce the costs from maintaining its legacy system and prepare for the next steps in its broader modernization strategy.

    Choosing the Right Approach

    A business doesn’t have to be a member of the Fortune 1000 in order to successfully execute a modernization project like one. By developing a strong understanding of the functions of current systems, the risks associated with maintaining it, organizational needs and a realistic timeline for transformation efforts, a company can uniquely position itself to make significant changes to operations without interruptions to business.

    While this transition is a significant undertaking for any organization, it’s up to them to identify the best modernization strategy for its goals in order to reduce costs, improve the customer experience and future-proof their processes to achieve overall success.

    — Cameron Jenkins

  • Is COBOL Here to Stay? Five Signs IT is Ready to Modernize

    Is COBOL Here to Stay? Five Signs IT is Ready to Modernize

    With increased demands and challenges around compliance and regulations, plus growing expectations for IT to provide more value-added services, companies are looking for more flexible and collaborative options. Interestingly though, while some IT departments have updated legacy systems, COBOL code has continued to be a mainstay. In fact, COBOL just turned 60 and many are saying it’s here for the long haul.

    There are a lot of reasons that make it challenging—or for some, unnecessary—to move away from the language, but there are also several clear signs companies and IT departments should know that indicate it’s time to make a change.

    Here are five signs IT leaders should pull the trigger on modernizing their legacy environments.

    You’re Constantly Worried About the Risk of Losing COBOL Expertise from Your Team

    COBOL has more production lines of code than any other language in existence, with over 220 billion lines of COBOL today—or around 80% of the world’s actively used code. One of the problems is that many that are well-versed in COBOL language are also nearing retirement, and the amount of COBOL programmers entering the market is much lower than it was 10 years ago.

    Author Glenn Fleishman put it best in his article on the subject stating “the language never died, though its early practitioners have faded away, and the generation of programmers who built systems towards the end of the predominant mainframe era in the 1970s and 1980s are largely near or past retirement age. It’s a slow-moving crisis with no crackling deadline, like Y2K, to focus the minds of Chief Information Officers.”

    Pressure from Business Leaders to Take Advantage of More Agile IT Methods

    Whether it’s cloud, DevOps or microservices, businesses want faster and more frequent IT delivery of new services to customers. In order to drive these results, embracing more agile methods of IT and developing a strategy that can support rapid application delivery is key. Moving to the cloud, integrating with Java or shifting to Linux requires open-based models that can handle legacy COBOL applications.

    You’re Quickly Losing Your Competitive Edge Because of the Reliance on Dated Technologies

    Direct and even indirect competitors are encroaching more and more in the industry and in new deals, and you feel as if your company’s position in the market is slowly declining. This may be a product of competitors’ willingness to open source systems that promote the business agility needed to react far more quickly to changing market dynamics and customer demands.

    If they are modernizing their IT and investing in new technologies quicker than you are, it’s likely they’ll catch up to or surpass you quickly.

    Your Confidence in Your Current IT Environment Is Extremely Low

    No matter the modernization strategy you pursue, you should ultimately feel confident and peace of mind when it comes to your environment today and as you look to the future. Without flexibility, collaboration and a tailored approach however, the business will likely suffer and may be the reason for the growing insecurities.

    For instance, if you’re interested in programming COBOL in some areas, but currently operate in a significantly pure native Java environment, a flexible and manageable solution is key. If you want to generate Java as the compiled object, the result will be inflexible static Java objects, rather than something flexible and extensible — and will require access to the Java source. That source is not nearly as maintainable as the source generated in the COBOL to Java conversion, but can be leveraged in Java-operating environments, and is much more flexible than other alternatives.

    You’re Experiencing Vendor Lock-In

    You’re wedded to an established tech company or consultants on-hand that seem like safe bets, but instead have caused you to miss the mark in being flexible and future-proof–not to mention are likely far over your budget to maintain. While transitioning to a new partner may seem daunting, conducting an assessment of your operational, infrastructure and application environment can provide a more comprehensive picture of the strategy that is right for the business, help manage the process more efficiently and ultimately cut unnecessary costs well before an exact migration or conversion path is decided on.

    Although many organizations have run COBOL without substantial updates and issues for decades, the ability to solely rely on the dated technology is quickly giving way to a growing need for additional languages and more agile systems. If IT leaders are experiencing one or more of these issues now, waiting any longer to address them can result in much bigger problems in the future and considering a modernization strategy may be the better path to success.

    — Cameron Jenkins

  • Legacy Systems Prove to be Digital Transformation Headwind

    Legacy Systems Prove to be Digital Transformation Headwind

    In a survey of 450 digital transformation leaders, a sizable 73% of respondents said that, through digital innovation, they have made significant or better improvements to the end-user experience. Twenty-two percent report much more significant results than that, they self-reported as having transformed or completely revolutionized end-user experience. That’s considerably higher than the 15% in the same survey in the previous year.

    These results, from the Couchbase 2019 Digital Transformation Report conducted within the U.S., U.K., France and Germany, are in stark contrast to results of a recent Kony survey which found, despite $5 trillion having been spent by enterprises on digital transformation, the vast majority of digital transformation initiatives fall short of customer expectations. Still, when it comes to digital transformation success, at least as far as its impact on customer experience, success is in the eye of the beholder.

    Of the $5 trillion spent over recent years, much of it has been invested in backend system improvements. If the Couchbase survey is any indication, there remains considerably more spending on back end and legacy systems. Despite the feeling of success cited in the survey, 86% of respondents said they are prevented from pursuing new digital services or transformation projects.

    Here’s why:

    • That 86% said factors including reliance on a legacy technology, complexity of implementing technologies and lack of resources and skills had prevented them from pursuing a new digital service or other transformation project their organization wanted.
    • A total of 55% said their reliance on relational databases somewhat limited their ability to implement digital transformation projects, while 17% said “severely.”
    • An 81% have had a digital transformation project fail, suffer a significant delay or be scaled back in the last 12 months.
    • A total of 42% said they were behind schedule, or at risk of falling behind, on their most significant digital transformation project.
    • A 73% said, while the huge potential of digital projects is often talked about, most of the time they fall short of being truly transformational or revolutionary–albeit a fall compared to the previous two years.

    Perhaps part of the challenge enterprises face is they are reacting to market pressure and not being led by business needs or visions for the business’s future created inhouse. According to the Couchbase survey, 52% have their digital transformation strategies set by IT and not business leadership. The drivers for these transformations tend to be, the survey found, reacting to business pressure such as customer demands for new services or responding to regulatory mandates. Surprisingly, the survey found, only 8% of transformative ideas executed are brainstormed from within the organization.

    Perhaps part of the reason why organizations are so reactive is because the rate of disruption is accelerating. According to the survey, 91% of respondents believe the speed of disruption in their industry has accelerated. In fact, 40% of respondents categorized that acceleration as rapid. Moreover, survey respondents plan on spending more on digital disruption this year over last, $30 million compared to $27 million.

    — George V. Hulme

  • NGINX Unveils Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform

    NGINX Unveils Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform

    NGINX this week announced it has developed a common framework for managing application delivery that can be applied across both monolithic and microservices-based applications.

    Announced at the NGINX Conf 2018 conference, the NGINX Application Platform has been rearchitected to provide traditional load balancing capabilities and a web application firewall (WAF), as well as a built-in service mesh for managing microservices and an integrated application programming interface (API) management platform.

    Sidney Rabsatt, vice president of product management at NGINX, said an update to NGINX Controller is at the heart of a much more comprehensive to approach to integrating load balancing, service mesh technologies and API management. Due out later this year, NGINX Controller 2.0 is based on a modular architecture that enables additional functions to be added via plug-in modules. The module for API management is slated for release in the fourth quarter, while the service mesh module is scheduled to become available in the first half of 2019.

    Rabsatt said it’s become clear IT organizations don’t want to replicate existing application delivery controllers just to manage microservices. There will never be such a thing as an enterprise IT environment this is made up entirely of microservices. The latest release of the NGINX Controller makes it possible to manage application delivery across the broad spectrum of applications that need to be addressed within modern IT environments, he said, noting that in effect, it’s a one-size-fits-all approach to managing application delivery via a single fabric.

    As part of that effort, NGINX this week also revealed that NGINX Plus R16, an enterprise-grade version of the core NGINX load balancing software, has been updated to apply load balancing algorithms to microservices running on Kubernetes clusters, in addition to support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) PrivateLink integration.

    Finally, NGINX announced version 1.4 of Unit, an open source web and application server that support TLS encryption, dynamic reconfiguration via an API and experimental support for JavaScript with Node.js to extend existing support for Go, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby languages support. Full support for JavaScript and Java is planned for 2019.

    In general, Rabsatt said it’s clear organizations that have embraced DevOps are the most advanced when it comes to the need to unify management of application delivery. In fact, much of the recent success NGINX has enjoyed as of late starts with developers downloading an open source instance of NGINX to embed within their applications. As those instances of NGINX start to proliferate across the enterprise, more IT operations teams become exposed to the rest of the NGINX platform.

    It may take a while for microservices-based applications to achieve enough critical mass to force organizations to rethink their approach to application delivery. But it’s now a matter of time before organizations need to decide the degree to which they want to deploy standalone application delivery controllers and service meshes for microservices applications instead of pursuing a more hybrid approach. NGINX is clearly betting on the latter, given the number of legacy monolithic applications that will be running for years.

    — Mike Vizard

  • The Move to Platform: Unleashing a Wealth of Opportunities in Fintech

    The Move to Platform: Unleashing a Wealth of Opportunities in Fintech

    Closed, legacy systems and requirements around availability and security remain major obstacles to innovation in the financial services industry. But there’s now an appetite for change and a growing recognition of the benefits to be gained from a platform-based approach. This article explores the legacy challenges that still plague financial services, examines the case for a move to platform and looks at the opportunities for developers in fintech moving forward.

    Overcoming Legacy

    Would you be surprised to learn that most financial organizations are still using the same legacy core banking systems they were using in the 1980s? Developed using languages such as COBOL, these proprietary back-end systems were deployed to speed the efficiency of specific tasks, including bank transactions and financial trading.

    As organizations added more applications over subsequent decades, they retained their core banking systems as the foundation on which everything else was built. This approach maximized ROI and achieved the best possible performance because mainframes were still faster than x86 servers.

    Each application was selected for its “best of breed” capabilities that solved specific business challenges, increased operational efficiency and protected against downtime. However, the new applications introduced new file formats, new programming languages such as C++ and new operating systems including Unix, Windows and flavors of Linux.  Banks now had even more silos and the need for even more technology experts to maintain them.

    Fast forward to a few years ago, and the next wave of innovation was driving digital workflows. Banks invested significant time and money to create custom connections between all their silos. Building on legacy was still faster and less risky than ripping and replacing the back end. However, point-to-point connections and new web-based apps introduced even more technologies such as Python, Ruby, Java and Javascript. Banks’ IT departments were now almost completely absorbed with just maintaining their legacy environments and meeting the needs of employees.

    Large banks today can have thousands of applications, and some of them can have 10 million lines of code. Even a small change can cause stability issues and downtime. A bank can lose millions or even billions of dollars a day if just one application goes down. This makes testing extremely critical. But the complexity of legacy environments translates into slower development cycles. Not only do projects require experts that understand legacy technologies, but also it often takes significant time to stand up the complicated systems to match the complex production environments. If a new application makes it to production, it’s often too late to make a competitive difference.

    What’s the Way Forward?

    Consumers today expect modern apps and services and they’re not seeing them fast enough from their banks, lenders and investors. Financial organizations must find a way to meet their customers’ expectations for anytime, anywhere access to their data and services, while maintaining their legacy investments.

    One way to accelerate development of modern customer-centric services with legacy systems is to use a cloud-based platform, based on open technologies, to facilitate communication between legacy systems and all new apps and services. This platform-based approach makes it possible to innovate and meet other requirements including security while retaining legacy as long as needed.

    We’re starting to see a platform revolution in financial services. By the end of 2019, financial experts predict that 25 percent of retail banks will be working with startups to replace legacy and mobile systems.

    An open-standards based platform that connects developers with global financial services companies is crucial in allowing collaboration and innovation on a global scale. So, instead of always having to develop dedicated solutions for individual silos, developers can first check and see if someone else has developed an app with an open API that solves all or part of their challenge.

    What Are the Opportunities for Developers?

    It’s an ideal time for developers to get involved in bringing new ideas and innovation to financial services. Banks are finally facing up to the threat posed by the tech giants and the need to digitally transform the services they offer.

    Banks’ willingness to open up and adopt a platform-based approach is growing and they are also starting to recognize the value in being able to tap into all the IT creativity and innovation that’s happening in other industries. Importantly, developers will no longer require specialized knowledge about the proprietary APIs and technologies supporting their legacy systems.

    Studies show that some of the best solution ideas come from people from analogous fields—fields that are different from each other but the same on some structural level. So, a developer who works on genomic data models may be able to help a hedge fund manager who needs to uncover patterns in data. Or a retail developer might offer new perspectives on how to manage transaction processing.

    In the past, if a bank wanted to evolve their technology in some way, they needed to engage a fintech, and there was a lot of back and forth. The process was so complicated. It could take months and many times it wasn’t successful. Using a platform-based approach that provides connectivity to a standard set of pre-built and fully integrated open APIs can dramatically optimize the software development environment, allowing apps to be developed in a matter of days.

    Giving developers the ability to interact with open APIs in a sandbox environment will allow them to experiment online in bringing data into their applications and to test the inputs and outputs in a safe environment. Using a low code development environment, they can create UX and business logic in a few clicks and test them in real time. Publishing those apps in a store helps developers to get visibility and solve the distribution problem. Finally, banks can purchase them and run them in the cloud through automated delivery, supported behind the scenes by CI/CD pipelines. Banks don’t need to worry about provisioning any additional hardware as the apps run in the cloud, and support hybrid scenarios as well, where the core system remains on-premises.

    The platform ecosystem is the future of how apps will be developed, deployed and consumed. It enables such convenience for the user that it is inevitable. Being able to reuse tools that other people develop instead of reinventing the wheel in every project will also save a tremendous amount of time.

    My advice for developers today? Seriously consider what value you can bring to financial services—banks and other providers need your support!

    — Félix Grévy