Today, as part of the Visual Studio 2010 launch, Microsoft published a video of my coworker, Esteban Brenes, doing a brief demo of the latest beta of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion 4.0. In this video, version 4.0 of the VBUC is used to generate code that works correctly with Visual Studio 2010. This is part of the VSIP Partners CAN DO! series of videos, which can be seen in this link.
Watch the video: VSIP Partners CAN DO! | ArtinSoft Visual Basic Upgrade Companion
I am proud to announce that today ArtinSoft released version 4.0 Beta of its flagship product the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion.
This new release once more collects our learnings from migrating millions and millions of lines of code from Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET and C#.
This release revolves around a number of themes:
1) Visual Studio 2010 compatibility: You can now use the VBUC to create projects that are compatible with Visual Studio 2010.
2) Take advantage of new framework features: The code generated by the VBUC now takes advange of some advanced features of the .NET Framework to improve the quality of the code avoiding dependencies to any third party runtime.
3) Compatibility with Windows 7 and 64 bits system: The platform is evolving and the VBUC is evolving along with it. Now the VBUC is compatible with Win XP, Vista and 7 on both 32 and 64 bits systems.
4) Impoved usability: We are trying to minimize the learning curve to start a VB migration project. There will be even more changes in this theme for the next release. (I am specially excited about this!)
Please read our official press release, learn the specifics of version 4.0 or give it a try!
You can also watch a video demo on the Microsoft site channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VSIPMarketing/VSIP-Partners-CAN-DO--ArtinSoft-Visual-Basic-Upgrade-Companion/
In it March issue, Visual Studio Magazine published an in-depth article about legacy migrations called “Unlocking Legacy Code”. This article talks about the challenges faced by companies migrating from Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET, the drivers behind these migrations and the pros and cons of using an automated migration solution.
The article uses BEMAS Software as a case study for successful migration products. I am incredibly happy they are doing as well as they are with the conversion – they are using our tools, and I visited BEMAS about a year and a half ago to train them on the VBUC and help them plan the migration project. I remember they had a lot of conditional statements (by “a lot”, we are talking thousands of different combinations), as mentioned in the article:
"We also ran into some issues with the conversion tool because early on in the VB code we did a lot of #ifs, which means that the code acts differently depending on how you compile it," Pownall adds. BEMAS worked with ArtinSoft so that VBUC would recognize those instances and convert the code correctly.
It was quite a challenge to get it to convert, since the default behavior of the VBUC is to convert the code inside the conditional statement that evaluates to “TRUE”. Commenting out the conditionals wasn’t going to work either, since that would cause multiple variable declarations and other semantic errors that caused issues during the migration of this particular code. In the end we worked together with BEMAS, and with heavy involvement of the VBUC development team, we managed to modify the tool enough to get the code converted correctly.
Another very interesting item mentioned by Steve Pownall in the article, that I want to talk about some more, is the fact that even though the code came through very cleanly, it didn’t have the .NET architecture they were aiming for so they had to “The dev team had to massage or opted to rewrite the rest of the codebase manually in C# and .NET 3.5 using VS2008.”. This is a very important point, since the overall architecture of the code will remain as it was in VB6.0. The migration, however, gets you quickly to a stable .NET codebase that you can then rework to make it take advantage of the latest features of the .NET Framework. In our experience, this path (migrate, then enhance) is the one with the lowest risk, and it allows you to reduce the time to market for your applications by a wide margin. This is important to keep in mind, since we, as developers, always want to improve the code base – it is part of our professional formation, and I would say, part of our nature – but we sometimes fail to grasp the additional risk this implies. The migration is very controlled process, that gets you predictable results in a short time. Enhancing the application after the migration may seem like duplicating work (and indeed, there are enhancements that can be done during the migration process) but it guarantees that you will get a .NET in the allocated timeframe and budget, not to mention the cost advantage.
Read the complete article, Unlocking Legacy Code at Visual Studio Magazine.
A quick post to let everybody know that you can now follow us on twitter. To do so, you just need to follow @artinsoft, or add “artinsoft” in your favorite Twitter client. In this account we are posting news and articles related to software migrations, and you can also use it to communicate directly with us in case you have any question or want to give us any feedback.
ArtinSoft Twitter page
In the last couple of months we’ve done several significant updates to the website that I think are worth commenting about. Here is a quick rundown of what has changed:
- Visual Basic Upgrade Companion Online Documentation: Back with the release of version 3.0 we also went live with the vbtonet.com website, a centralized resource for all information about the VBUC. It contains useful information such as a description of the features of the VBUC, a knowledge base with solutions to common migration problems, the VBUC Quick Start Guide, several How-To’s and other general information about the tool and migration projects in general.
- Updated Services offering: We completely revamped the Migration Services website. You can now get a general overview of our migration services offering, obtain a quick VB Migration Project Ballpark estimate and check out the necessary steps for engaging our services. The ballpark can obviously vary, and sometimes significantly as requirements for a migration are further refined and all applications are different, but normally migrations projects are within the same order of magnitude as the numbers produced by this page.
- Visual Basic Upgrade Companion Trial download: You can download, as before, a fully functional trial of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion Developer Edition, limited to 10,000 Lines of Code with migration solutions up to 2,000 Lines of Code in size, or request a personalized trial of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion Enterprise Edition.
- Purchase Licenses Online: The biggest addition we’ve done to the site is that now it is possible to purchase licenses for both the VBUC Developer and Enteprise Editions up to 150,000 lines of code directly, online, from this link. This was motivated by the success we’ve had with selling licenses for the VBUC DE on the web since January. Given the requests of our customers, we decided to both expand the amount of offerings in terms of lines of code allowed per migration with the Developer Edition (from 50,000 to a max of 150,000, plus a 25,000 LOC option) and to make available licenses of the Enterprise Edition in that LOC range as well.
We hope you find this new information we published useful, and please add a comment to this post or send me a message with your thoughts on the new changes and if there’s anything you would like to see on our site.
Aberdeen Group recently published a report titled “Migrating from VB6 to .NET: The challenge of Software Agility in a Volatile Economy”.
The report contains a good summary of the status quo with respect to Visual Basic 6 renewal efforts. It is based on a survey of 130 organizations at the end of 2008.
The Aberdeen report contains lots of advice for organizations that are faced with the challenge of upgrading their infrastructure, I think it is worth reading it.
ArtinSoft is very proud to have been recognized as a key player in the Visual Basic migration game along with a number of its outsourcing partners. This shows once more how our 15 years trajectory in the migration business is our best letter of presentation.
In his summary of the report, Aberdeen analyst Michael Lock also shows how best in class companies have a much greater tendency to use automatic migration tools to support their porting efforts. During these times of financial uncertainty is more important than ever to minimize the cost of evolving your infrastructure and automation is certainly a good way of doing so. ArtinSoft approach to automatic migration is aimed at minimizing the cost of reaching functional equivalence while at the same time ensuring that all delivered code is completely .NET native and ready to be evolved to the next level by our customers. ArtinSoft offers the best balance between cost speed and future insurance. Jose Aguilar also analyzes some of the conclusions from Aberdeen in this blog post.
If you are deciding what’s your next move with VB6, you should certainly read the Aberdeen report and you should look at our Visual Basic Upgrade Companion 3.0 and our new technical resources site www.VBtoNET.com .
On Wednesday April 15th 2009 Avanade and ArtinSoft will host a webinar on how to quickly and cost effectively renew your Visual Basic 6 applications.
Here’s an excerpt from the invitation:
“Don’t miss this chance to learn more about VBUC and other cost effective migration options, including:
• Which migration strategy works best for you (complete, partial,
coexistent, partial development)
• How to reduce project risk, costs, and time to market
• How to guarantee business continuity by preserving knowledge
invested in legacy applications“
You can RSVP and make sure you don’t forget to attend.
Here is a summary of some recent case studies that we have produced with our customers.
The message is common: Visual Basic 6 to C# migrations are an excellent alternative that saves time and money when you need to move your application to .NET.
HSI
This Texas-based company provides geo-navigation solutions for the horizontal drilling industry, and when the end of official support for the VB6 development environment was announced, they turned to ArtinSoft to migrate their LatNav application from VB6 to C# on a turn-key basis, using a slightly customized version of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion.
“Utilizing the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion saved us about one year of development and $160,000. This conversion will allow us to leapfrog well in front of our competition” -- Ken Bowdon - HSI founder
Read the full HSI case study.
MDA
After discarding a manual rewrite and the Upgrade Wizard, MDA –a software services provider for the real estate sector– settled for ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion tool, with which RDO was transformed to ADO.NET, third party controls were converted to native .NET controls, Component One’s True DB grid was upgraded to the latest version of that component, and coding standards that were common place when developing in Visual Basic 6.0 were also migrated to equivalents in VB.NET.
“We looked at different options, like a rewrite and the Upgrade Wizard. The UW couldn’t cater for our needs, especially since we were going from RDO to ADO.NET. A rewrite would have been about a five-year project for us, and possibly in the region of US$500,000. Using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion represented an estimated saving for the project of about 3 years and US$300,000”. -- Rodger Beadle – Technical Director, MDA
Read the full MDA case study.
Vertex
Vertex, a leading global BPO and customer management outsourcing company, managed to ensure compliance and business continuity by upgrading not one, but two mission-critical applications from VB to .NET using a customized version of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion (VBUC). These case studies underscore the joint efforts made by both companies, which proved to be decisive to accomplish the goal of having both migrated applications up and running within some serious time constrains.
"ArtinSoft has been an excellent company to work with. They have been responsive to requests from Vertex to change their processes in order to accommodate the way in which we work. They have provided us with daily updates throughout the migration life cycle and have worked in partnership with Vertex to resolve any issues that have arisen in a pragmatic and expedient manner." -- Sue Craig - Senior Project Manager, Vertex
Read the full Vertex Omiga Case Study.
Read the full Vertex Supervisor Case Study.
Banamex / Citigroup
Learn how Banamex, one of the most widely recognized financial institutions in Latin America and purchased by Citigroup in 2001, was able to migrate over 5 million lines of code from VB6 and ASP to C# and ASP.NET using ArtinSoft’s Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, in compliance with Citigroup’s corporate policies for quality assurance and information security. The project also included the creation of an effective collaboration environment and the implementation of highly advanced security tactics in order to guarantee full confidentiality in data handling.
Read the full Banamex/Citigroup Case Study.
At some point in time companies decide they want to leave a certain platform. Let’s not focus on the reasons why they decide to move but on HOW to move instead. Companies reach the decision to move on their own timetable.
Once you have decided that you want to move away from VB6 then ArtinSoft comes into play. The purpose of my blog is to show that there is a way out that is good, fast and cost-effective. Compared to what? You might ask, let’s see.
Once you decide to move (let me be clear, you made the decision to move, then the rest of the discussion applies) you have to assess your applications and make a decision on HOW to move them one by one.
There are three axes along which we recommend our customers to make the analysis:
- How unique is the functionality to your business? For example, if you have a general ledger that does not have any particular features for your business, if you have a “me too” app that does not give you an advantage over your competitors, well, you should consider just buying a package and replace it.
- How good is the technical quality of your source code? Have you followed best practices in VB? Is your code maintainable by a third party? (Can they understand it?) If the answer is no then migrating it to a new language is not going to improve this situation. Consider a rewrite.
- How fast is the functionality changing to meet business goals? Is the business process it supports fixed? Do you anticipate that very minimal changes will happen before retirement? Then you should just leave it as is (one caveat here, in some industries because of regulatory issues you might still make sure you are on a fully supported platform even if the application does not change).
Now, if you have an application that provides you a business advantage, that is of good technical quality and that needs to adapt to new business challenges, then you have a good candidate for a migration.
For applications with the above characteristics, why is a migration better than a rewrite?
- Cost: when we look at cost there are several dimensions.
- Cost of the actual migration process: An automatic migration to functional equivalence can be done with about 20% of the cost of a rewrite. Most of that cost is testing and fine tuning of the application to the new platform.
- Training of end users: Since the application is functionally equivalent it is not necessary to retrain end-users. With a rewrite, chances are that the output is not going to be functionally equivalent unless you follow an algorithmic approach just like an automatic migration and therefore end users need a retraining. In addition to the actual retraining cost (which can be enormous – e.g. we worked with a customer whose system required a 6 weeks training time, for 3000 users. An application replacement or rewrite would have started with that hole in front of them) but the opportunity cost. New software, new mistakes, how does that impact the business continuity?
- Time: An automatic migration process can also be done in about 20% of a rewrite. This means that you can free up resources much faster to actually build new functionality that the business requires instead of attempting to replicate functionality that already works.
- Quality: An automatic migration does not fundamentally change the architecture of the original application (even if certain aspects like data access and some pieces of GUI architecture do change). The question is: do you really need to change the architecture for the whole application? Probably not. You might need to change the architecture for certain processes. The code that is generated by ArtinSoft is completely ready for evolution. No strange variable names, all comments preservation, no restructuring of the code, etc. Even if in the worst case scenario you need to rewrite a certain piece of the application it is always a fraction of the total cost.
Comments?
Danish magazine Version2 published an interesting article last week on VB6 migrations: http://www.version2.dk/artikel/9908-saadan-flyttes-milliarder-af-kodelinjer-fra-vb6#forum_post_anchor .
Microsoft is finally waving goodbye to Visual Basic Version 6. Its successor, VB.Net, is not backward compatible, but the company Artinsoft from Costa Rica can help with a translation machine.
By Tania Andersen, Wednesday 11 February 2009
This article really shows momentum in northern Europe.
Enjoy!
Earlier this week we launched an joint initiative with Microsoft and Avanade in the UK for helping Visual Basic 6.0 developers move their applications to .NET. The initiative consists of several parts:
The initiative is UK-only at the time, but if you want to take advantage of these time-limited deals feel free to contact us. The press release for the campaign can be found here and at our website. Eric Nelson from Microsoft has been heavily involved - you can read his blog post on the initiative here.
The campaign has been well received so far. In the two days since launch, we already have several leads interested in both offerings!!
Jointly with the Visual Basic 6.0 migration campaign we are launching in the UK, today we released the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion Developer Edition. This is a scaled down version of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion, targeted at individual developers that want to migrate their Visual Basic 6.0 applications as fast and painlessly as possible. It has a license that is valid for three months and allows you to migrate an application of up to 50,000 lines of code.
The VBUC Developer Edition does have some fewer features than the fully-fledged Visual Basic Upgrade Companion. All the features that we decided to include in the Developer Edition, however, are targeted towards automating as much of the migration process as possible. So, we left out features that have been introduced by the request of our enterprise customers over the 7+ years the tool has been on the market (yep, we were already doing VB6 migrations before the official release of .NET - and it wasn't all fun with the Betas). We made it so that getting an application up and running in C# or VB.NET is as simple as possible.
Here you can see the VBUC Developer Edition in action (video recorded by yours truly :) ):
And, as an introductory offer, The VBUC Developer Edition will only cost £199 for a limited time. So why wait?
Starting tomorrow January 27th we will be
engaging with Microsoft on a campaign aimed
towards helping companies and developers in the UK move their Visual Basic 6.0
applications to the .NET platform. This is not the first time we provide
migration solutions in that territory,
since we have lots of customers
there already (you can read some of our case studies and references here), but this is the first occasion
we join forces on a massive scale effort locally with 2 of our major partners:
Microsoft and Avanade. ArtinSoft will be providing tools, resources and
guidance, along with limited-time offers during this campaign. For example, we’ll
have a 10% discount on licenses of our Visual
Basic Upgrade Companion for the enterprise level, while launching the Visual
Basic Upgrade Companion Developer Edition at a special introductory price
of only £199. For those who require a turn-key solution, we have also partnered
with Avanade to deliver the most
comprehensive, cost-effective Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET migration solution. So
if you are based in the UK and still have Visual Basic 6.0 investments that
need to be leveraged, click here to learn
more about this campaign, and contact us as soon as possible to take advantage
of this unique opportunity.
ArtinSoft recently published a number of case studies of Visual Basic migrations for ISVs. The projects were successful both from the technical as well as the economical perspective. If you are an ISV and you are considering an evolution of your application and a port to the .net platform I encourage you to take a look:http://www.artinsoft.com/vertex-omiga-vb-to-net-migration-case-study.aspx
http://www.artinsoft.com/vertex-supervisor-vb-to-net-migration-case-study.aspx
http://www.artinsoft.com/hsi-latnav-vb-to-net-migration-case-study.aspx
In this blog I am trying to be as unbiased as possible in reporting my opinion with regards to VB migrations. This time I am mentioning the case studies as evidence that a lot of the conceptual discussions that I have are actually happening in reality. It is interesting to see how many of the comments to this blog tend to be from skeptics and from people that just love VB6 and do not want to abandon it. My purpose is to show that there is life after VB6 and that an automatic migration is not only possible but, in many cases, a great alternative for your evolution plans.Please let me know what you think of the case studies.
Today we published a new White Paper, Planning a Successful VB to .NET Migration: 8 Proven Tips. In it, we share some tips on things that you should be aware of when migrating your applications.
This is the first in a series of White Papers we will be releasing in the next months. The idea is to share the knowledge we have accumulated over the years performing Visual Basic 6.0 migrations to the .NET Framework. We have been involved with Microsoft in this type of engagements since the very beginning of the platform, and faced lots of issues in the process. This has shaped our current methodology, which, even though is still improving, has proven itself with solid results (a you can read in the recently released case studies). Hopefully you will find them very useful when faced with a migration task at your organization.
As I mention in a post last week, we recently released version 2.2 of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion. The previous version, 2.1, added some new things, but focused mostly on "under the covers" improvements, and fixing several issues reported with version 2.0. However, for this release, we do have several exciting new features that should make migrations from Visual Basic 6.0 go much smoother. Among these, we can mention:
Custom Mappings
The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion enables the user to define customized transformations for the upgrade process execution. This technique allows to implement coverage for non-supported legacy components and to enhance and fine-tune the existing support. I already covered Custom Maps on this post and you can read more about this on the Custom Maps page.
Data access - new flavors available
The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion converts the data access model on your VB6 application (ADO, DAO, RDO) to ADO.NET, using the either SQLClient data provider or the classes defined in the System.Data.Common namespace. Using the latter will allow your migrated application to connect with most major .NET database providers. Version 2.2 added support for the automated migration of DAO and RDO to ADO.NET, and greatly improved the migration of ADO to ADO.NET. More information here.
Naming conventions refactoring
This feature lets the end-user migrate his Visual Basic 6 code to VB.NET or C# with standard Naming Conventions. This feature is a compound of common naming conventions for .NET languages, and use standard coding practices for C# and VB.NET. You can find more information on this and the next feature in this page.
Renaming mechanism
The renaming feature changes the name of an identifier and all of its references in order to avoid conflicts with another name. Some of the conflicts solved by the VBUC are:
- Keywords: The VBUC must rename the names that are the same as keywords from Visual Basic .NET and C#. Moreover, the VBUC should take into account the target language (Visual Basic.NET or C#) to recognize the keywords that apply for each case.
- Case sensitive issues (C#): Visual Basic 6 is a case insensitive language, but C# is not. The VBUC must correct the name references used with different cases to the case used in the declaration.
- Scope conflict: This is necessary when a Type declaration element has the same name as the type declaration. If this case is detected the element declaration must be renamed along with the references to this type element.
- Conflicts with .NET classes: This section applies for Forms and UserControls, mainly, because they could declare some member names that are part of the corresponding class in .NET (in this case System.Windows.Forms.Form & System.Windows.Forms.UserControl). These members must be renamed in order to avoid any conflict.
User Controls and Custom Properties
In Visual Basic 6.0 user controls expose their programmer-defined properties in the property list on the designer window. These user properties can be configured to be displayed in a specific category and based on these settings. The Visual Basic Upgrade Companion can determine the most appropriate type and settings for the resulting properties to have functional equivalence with the original VB6 user property. I plan on elaborating on this feature in a future blog post.
After several months of hard work, we are proud to announce the release of version 2.2 of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion. This version includes significant enhancements to the tool, including:
- Custom Maps: You can now define custom transformations for libraries that have somewhat similar interfaces. This should significantly speed up your migration projects if you are using third party controls that have a native .NET version or if you are already developing in .NET and wish to map methods from your VB6 code to your .NET code.
- Legacy VB6 Data Access Models: for version 2.2 we now support the transformation of ADO, RDO and DAO to ADO.NET. This data access migration is implemented using the classes and interfaces from the System.Data.Common namespace, so you should be able to connect to any database using any ADO.NET data provider.
- Support for additional third party libraries: We have enhanced the support for third party libraries, for which we both extended the coverage of the libraries we already supported and added additional libraries. The complete list can be found here.
- Plus hundreds of bug fixes and code generation improvements based on the feedback from our clients and partners!
You can get more information on the tool on the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion web page. You can also read about our migration services, which have helped many companies to successfully take advantage of their current investments in VB6 by moving their applications to the .NET Framework in record time!
A few days ago we posted some new case studies to our site. These case studies highlight the positive impression that the capabilities of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion leave on our customers when we do Visual Basic 6.0 to C# migrations.
The first couple of them deal with a UK company called Vertex. We did two migration projects with them, one for a web-based application, and another one for a desktop application. Vertex had a very clear idea of how they wanted the migrated code to look like. We added custom rules to the VBUC in order to meet their highly technical requirements, so the VBUC would do most of the work and speed up the process. Click on the links to read the case studies for their Omiga application or for the Supervisor application.
The other one deals with a Texas-based company called HSI. By going with us they managed to move all their Visual Basic 6.0 code (including their data access and charting components) to native .NET code. They estimate that by using the Visual Basic Upgrade companion they saved about a year in development time and a lot of money. You can read the case study here.
Milan Negovan in his blog aspnetresources recently published an excerpt of Michael Feathers' book Working Effectively with Legacy Code. I liked the excerpt so much and I believe that it is so pertinent to the topic of my blog that I also will reproduce it verbatim.
--
Often people who spend time working on legacy systems wish they could work on green-field systems. It’s fun to build systems from scratch, but frankly, green-field systems have their own set of problems. Over and over again, I’ve seen the following scenario play out:
An existing system becomes murky and hard to change over time. People in the organization get frustrated with how long it takes to make changes in it. They move their best people (and sometimes their trouble-makers!) onto a new team that is charged with the task of “creating the replacement system with a better architecture.”
In the beginning, everything is fine. They know what the problems were with the old architecture, and they spend some time coming up with a new design. In the meantime, the rest of the developers are working on the old system. The system is in service, so they receive requests for bug fixes and occasionally new features.
The business looks soberly at each new feature and decides whether it needs to be in the old system or whether the client can wait for the new system. In many cases, the client can’t wait, so the change goes in both. The green-field team has to do double-duty, trying to replace a system that is constantly changing.
As the months go by it becomes clearer that they are not going to be able to replace the old system, the system you’re maintaining. The pressure increases. They work days, nights, and week-ends. In many cases, the rest of the organization discovers that the work you are doing is critical and that you are tending the investment that everyone will have to reply on in the future.
The grass isn’t really much greener in the green-field development.
--
I concord 100% with Michael Feathers. Rewriting code is something that can be achieved only at a very large rate of consumption of time and money! My thesis is that migration, specially automatic migration, is often the best option. You can easily change the platform and then focus on rewriting/rearchitecting only the pieces that truly deserve it. This has been proven over and over again at ArtinSoft.
It’s well known that financial institutions are under a lot
of pressure to replace their core legacy systems, and here at ArtinSoft we’ve seen an increased interest
from this industry towards our migration services and products, specially our Visual Basic Upgrade
Companion tool and our VB to
.NET upgrade services. In fact,
during the last year or so we’ve helped lots of these institutions move their
business critical applications to newer platforms, accounting for millions of
lines of code successfully migrated at low risk, cost and time.
Margin pressures and shrinking IT budgets have always been a
considerable factor for this sector, with financial institutions constantly
looking for a way to produce more with less. Some studies show that most of
them allocate around 80% of their budgets maintaining their current IT
infrastructure, much of which comprised by legacy applications.
Competition has also acted as another driver for legacy
modernization, with organizations actively looking for a competitive advantage
in a globalized world. Legacy applications, like other intangible assets, are
hard to emulate by competitors, so they represent key differentiators and a source
of competitive advantage. Typically, significant investments in intellectual
capital have been implanted in the legacy systems over the years (information
about services, customers, operations, processes, etc.), constituting the
back-bone of many companies.
In the past, they approached modernization in an incremental
way, but recent compliance and security developments have drastically impacted
financial institutions. In order to comply with new regulations, they are
forced to quickly upgrade their valuable legacy
software assets. Industry analysts estimate that between 20-30% of a bank's
base budget is spent on compliance demands, so they are urgently seeking for
ways to reduce this cost so that they can invest in more strategic projects.
However, many institutions manually rewrite their legacy
applications, a disruptive method that consumes a lot of resources, and normally
causes loss of business knowledge embedded in these systems. Hence the pain and
mixed results that Bank Technology News’ Editor in Chief, Holly Sraeel,
describes on her article “From
Pain to Gain With Core Banking Swap Outs”. “Most players concede that such
a move (core banking replacement) is desirable and considered more strategic
today than in years past. So why don’t more banks take up the cause? It’s still
a painful—and expensive—process, with no guarantees”, she notes. “The
replacement of such a system (…) represents the most complex, risky and
expensive IT project an institution can undertake. Still, the payoff can far
exceed the risks associated with replacement projects, particularly if one
factors in the greater efficiency, access to information and ability to add
applications.”
That’s when the concept of a proven automated legacy
migration solution emerges as the most viable and cost-effective path towards
compliance, preserving the business knowledge present in these assets, enhancing
their functionality afterwards, and avoiding the technological obsolescence
dead-end trap. Even more when this is no longer optional due to today’s tighter
regulations. As Logica’s William Morgan clearly states on the interview
I mentioned on my previous post,
“compliance regimes in Financial Services can often dictate it an unacceptable
operational risk to run critical applications on unsupported software”.
“These applications are becoming a real risk and some are
increasingly costly to maintain. Regulators are uncomfortable about
unsupported critical applications. Migrating into the .NET platform, either to VB.NET
or C# contains the issue. Clients are keen to move to new technologies in the
simplest and most cost effective way so that their teams can quickly focus on
developments in newer technologies and build teams with up to date skills”, he
ads, referring specifically to VB6 to .NET migrations.
So, as I mentioned before, ArtinSoft has a lot of experience in large
scale critical migration projects, and in the last year we’ve provided
compliance relief for the financial sector. With advanced automated migration
tools you can license, or expert consulting services and a growing partner
network through which you can outsource the whole project on a fixed time and
cost basis, we can definitely help you move your core systems to the latest
platforms.