Application Owners/IT Leaders Archives

Why UX equivalency matters in modernizations

Mission-critical IT applications that are built in-house have been in development for hundreds of person-years, with many dozens of engineers and testers responsible for their years of maintenance, which would translate to hundreds of millions of dollars. More often than not, the documentation is scarce and inadequate to effectively support and especially to maintain these systems. Yet the users of the system are very proficient and efficient in implementing it. They have developed their own custom shortcuts and tricks for getting their jobs done.

Rewrites or wholesale replacements of the mission-critical application inevitably leave the company with an entirely different system. In addition to the cost, time, and effort needed to replace a legacy system, an IT organization also would be required to retrain the end-users on the new system and replace all the manuals and documentation. This costs the company not only money but precious time.

Retraining the workforce is a big disruption for a business. This is why many modernizations are delayed until the situation turns dire—when the infrastructure will no longer support the system or there isn’t anyone left to maintain it.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

What is UX equivalency?

What we mean by user experience (UX) equivalency is that the modernized system would remain recognizable to the end-user and would be 100% equivalent from a usability perspective. With today’s technology, we can take a hosted/mainframe or desktop system and recreate the exact same look, feel, and behavior in a browser.

Similarly, a Windows-based MDI-type GUI application that uses drag and drop, tables, spreadsheets, graphics, modal/modeless dialogs, etc., also can be modernized to work in the browser as an HTML5 Single Page Application (SPA) with equivalent GUI functionality, richness, and presentation semantics. And we can do this without any special browser plug-ins or any desktop deployments. When the user types in a URL, the usability and functionality of their system will remain equivalent inside the browser, with all the benefits of being in a modern programming language and platform.

What are the benefits of UX equivalency?

A pure technologist may argue against having the modernized application look and feel like the dated application, but the business benefits are far too great to ignore. These include:

No end-user retraining for internal, external, or even paying customers
No need to update support, knowledge bases, training manuals, or any other documentation
No need for a massive change management overhaul
No degradation in performance; preserves all built-in performance efficiencies developed by engineers over the years
No productivity loss; preserves all the known productivity shortcuts already developed by end-users
No production release delays; following user acceptance (UAT), a modernized application is ready to go live

Only a modernization that guarantees UX equivalency can ensure no operational disruptions to the business. UX equivalency really focuses on eliminating the hidden costs associated with modernizations.

Hidden costs savings of UX equivalency

These hidden costs of modernizations due to a new UX can be quite staggering, especially if it necessitates retraining a sizable workforce or one that is dispersed worldwide. To illustrate the impact, here’s an example of an enterprise insurance company.

This insurance company had a propriety system that handled all their rating and quoting. Customers would call the company to obtain quotes on their automobile, homeowners, or other insurance, and the agents would enter this information into the system to supply the quotes. In addition, the company also relied on a distribution channel of third-party agents to help drive new business. These third-party agents typically were employed by small insurance companies that also used the system to provide quotes to prospective customers.

In the case of a new UX, this company would need to retrain all of its 10,000 employees on the new system, as well as their external workforce, a network of 20,000 independent insurance agents. Once the company began adding these additional costs, the modernization would become both expensive and disruptive. While this is feasible, the opportunity costs are quite high and the impact on the end-user experience could be overwhelming.

A modernization approach that ensures 100% UX equivalency would prevent the pitfalls described above and allow the entire workforce of 30,000 agents to continue their day-to-day operations with no interruption and little to no impact on the overall business.

UX equivalency helps the developers, too

UX equivalency also is important for the developers who update, modify, and support the modernized application. The learning curve of a modernization application would be limited to only the adoption of a new programming language. Structurally, the source code would remain the same. Any test automation scenarios built over the years would remain unchanged, and the engineers and testers would be able to use them on the target platform. Therefore, developers would be able to smoothly transition to the new platform and apply their domain expertise to further enhance and maintain the system, with minimal impact. Once the modernized application goes live, both the end-users and the developers would remain 100% productive in running and maintaining the modernized system.

Synchrony Systems guarantees 100% UX equivalency in modernizations

Synchrony understands that modernizing a large and complex legacy application can be a major undertaking, fraught with high risk and expense. It doesn’t have to be this way. Our approach and methodology, backed by the power of MLP, accelerate the modernization time-to-value and guarantees functional and UX equivalency. We balance the overall speed, cost, quality, and risk while creating a unified experience, in order to address the inherent complexity of a modernization process in a frictionless and predictable way.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you maintain 100% UX equivalency on your modernization initiative. Your users will thank you!

Modernization as a service (MaaS): CEO interview

Our founder and CEO, Slavik Zorin, has been a pioneer in legacy application modernization for 20 years. His approach to modernizations has been quite different from traditional modernizations. These excerpts expand on the concept of Modernization-as-a-Service (MaaS), introduced in part 1, and on the future of modernization.

The power of Modernization-as-a-Service (MaaS)

“The MaaS platform forms the ecosystem that enables all stakeholders to participate in the legacy modernization process in an open, transparent and collaborative manner. The ecosystem consists of three types of stakeholders. First are the suppliers of modernization tools and technologies who support and extend the technical platform in real-time and on-demand. Second are the providers of the modernization services, the system integrators, and professional services companies who use the MaaS platform to perform the necessary work of modernizing the legacy applications. Third are the consumers, who are the customers that own the legacy applications and who play an important role in areas such as quality assurance, review, and acceptance testing of the modernized applications.

MaaS is the game changer because it brings all stakeholders onto a single unified modernization platform that allows running not one, or two, but thousands of modernization projects at the same time. Today, companies who specialize in this field are capable of running only a handful of modernizations at a time within their specific niche. That makes them service companies, not software companies. Scaling a migration company from a one modernization at-a-time services company to thousand modernizations at-a-time software company is the vision behind MaaS.

Just think about it: MaaS revolutionizes today’s approach to legacy modernizations. It is the first collaborative modernization platform of its kind that creates a new industry and injects new life into the massive IT inventory of aging software systems. We have the necessary ingredients for it to work today: the bandwidth; the scalable cloud computing infrastructure that is 24 by 7; and the business imperatives of economizing and therefore, capitalizing on the massive investments already made in IT. MaaS brings it all together: the technology and the ecosystem which are the key ingredients for creating massive competitive advantage.”

The future of the legacy application modernization market is MaaS

“What I see is that there will be no such thing as application software that is left behind or lost to obsolescence. I see the future as a world without legacy applications.

The MaaS platform offers companies a continuous evolution for their application software. Once the platform and the ecosystem grow and become ubiquitous, companies will be empowered to modernize their applications frequently; similar to the frequency with which most homeowners renovate their homes compared to those who level and rebuild them ground-up.

My vision is that a world without legacy applications is one powered by a platform like MaaS that will become the springboard for industrialization of the current legacy modernization market. It is the vehicle that will transform the current market from small and fractured niches into a global industry.

Deliver a ubiquitous platform with a worldwide ecosystem supporting a) the entire lifecycle of legacy application modernization and b) the continuous evolution of legacy application software.”

This MaaS vision is the genesis of our Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP). It’s a MaaS platform that supports the entire modernization lifecycle—from analysis and planning to continuous transformation, build and deployment, to testing and production release—for all stakeholders.

CEO interview part 1: modernization approaches

Our founder and CEO, Slavik Zorin, has been a pioneer in legacy application modernization for 20 years. His approach to modernization has been quite different from traditional modernization. Back in 2011 – yes, over a decade ago – he was interviewed about his vision for the future, modern-day modernization approaches now made real by his company, Synchrony Systems.

Here are a few excerpts from that interview that still ring true.

The differences and benefits of the Synchrony Systems approach to modernization

“The mainstream of legacy application modernization is a people-driven business. In addition to transforming the programming language, it promises to transform the old application architecture to the new service-oriented architecture, improve code quality and reuse, and in the process, redesign the old User Interface to modern web-based UI.

This is a great promise, but it comes packaged in a roadmap that is upside-down. It is upside-down because any structural or architectural redesign actually breaks the functionality of the application. Changing the programming language and the underlying application architecture and design at the same time turns the modernization into a rewrite and makes it a people-driven business that is labor-intensive, complex, expensive, and therefore fraught with the risk of ever completing.

We offer an alternative—an automated, software-driven solution called migration that eliminates the current manual, labor-intensive and error-prone approach to modernization. Migration focuses on software asset preservation while modernization focuses on its improvement. Modernization should be done on the modern platform using modern tools, so the main goal should be to get the legacy application to the target platform as soon as possible. Migration transforms the legacy application to the target platform “as-is” – without changing the original software architecture or design. As the first step of modernization, migration makes the transition to the target platform manageable and predictable. Unlike a rewrite, it guarantees to complete on time and on budget and ensures that the application functions and feels exactly the same as the original.

Our motto for application modernization is: migrate the application to the target platform and get it working first; do everything else second.”

The current landscape of legacy application modernization companies

“For the most part, legacy application modernization is a services industry. The industry is quite fragmented with companies focusing on their own niche legacy market. Migration software, if there is one at all, is proprietary, and only gets used by the companies who developed it. It is hard to scale such a business model since it can only sustain a handful of modernization projects at a time. No one company, in particular, is a recognized leader in application modernization.

The System Integrators who win the big enterprise modernization and portfolio optimization deals generally subcontract specific application modernization projects to local vendors with unique skills in certain areas of their specialty. Unless applications are retired or replaced with off-the-shelf products, modernization projects are sold as professional services and not as software.

Before anyone can fully capitalize on the large software application legacy, the current fractured market of niche companies needs to be consolidated and industrialized. A new scaleable solution has to emerge in order to bring together all stakeholders into a single integrated and collaborative modernization platform that is a win-win for everyone. We call that platform MaaS – Modernization-as-a-Service, and we believe it will change the industry as we know it.”

Why is there no $1 billion market leader today?

Readers Note: There is still no $1 billion market leader

“The market for legacy modernization is clearly huge – and global. By some estimates, in excess of $100 billion. But only a fraction of the opportunity is currently being realized by any one company.

I think it is obvious that application modernization is a hard problem with a large barrier to entry for anyone. It requires deep knowledge of source and target software platforms. In general, the skills required to perform application modernization are quite uncommon and not easily acquired. To top it off, very few companies have captured their experience into software that addresses this challenge in a systematic and repeatable fashion without relying exclusively on services. Services are required to deliver a modernization solution, but only a software platform can scale it. This is the MaaS platform I just spoke about, and it is the major ingredient for a $1B market leader to emerge.

But for such a platform to gain global acceptance, it will need backing from a major industry force. Modernization projects are not just simple upgrades. Modernization promises customers a smooth transition to a new platform where their mission-critical applications will continue running their businesses uninterrupted. This is a tall order! Companies modernize only the applications that they maintain, and they maintain only the ones that matter – the ones which bring value and run their businesses. Corporate IT needs to bridge the gap between the Software Development Lifecycle, something that is well known, and the Software Modernization Lifecycle, something that is not. It will take a company like IBM to help organizations bridge that gap. With enough clout backing this approach and the MaaS platform, I believe we have the necessary ingredients for the emergence of a $1B enterprise.”

Read more about Modernization as a Service (MaaS), the new technology-driven approach to modernizations.

Synchrony Systems takes mobile features live in 45 seconds versus three months [VIDEO]

In this short video, Synchrony Systems CEO Slavik Zorin discusses how IBM Bluemix dramatically accelerated mobile application delivery for BART. Reflecting on the experience, he explains how an integrated cloud development and DevOps environment reduced what would traditionally take months into a matter of days—highlighting the practical impact of streamlined provisioning, deployment, and publishing processes.

Bluemix offers the customers today one place where you can do rapid development with services that can be bound, can be dynamically provision on the fly. And not only that you can do development there, but you can actually do the whole DevOps process of publishing and of getting the products to run there, getting your software to run there immediately.

The mobile pilot application that Synchrony Systems is building for BART is for their operations to get real time status information about cars. That pilot is using Bluemix, it’s running in Bluemix, and it’s using the entire DevOps Bluemix development environment to put an application in production. Hopefully, that extends today their existing legacy application that they are using, the web-based application that they are using in-house.

BART was discussing mobile with Synchrony Systems for a while, but it has always been a challenge to hit the ground running. So with Bluemix, what we are able to do is tell them, “Look guys, let us show you what it takes to put a system in production without all the headaches of trying to figure out what it means to get your interfaces with mobile platforms, get the appropriate software in place to provision the right hardware.”

One of the glaring results that we’ve seen here is once we started using Bluemix and building this application is that instead of the typical six months’ effort that an organization would take to build an application like that, it took us 15 days from concept to a running system.

And that is potential going forward, cost savings for BART of possibly in the area of 80 to 90 percent. They no longer have to be afraid of six-months to one-year to two-year project engagements. They can see that systems like that can go from inception to production in about 15 to 20 to 30 days. Now that’s a huge benefit.