Modernize applications while preserving business-critical functionality
Success in today’s marketplace is largely determined by the speed and efficiency with which technology drives digital engagement.
The more current your business is with the latest technology, the more competitive it is.
But as your in-house applications age, the more out of date with technology they become.
This ever-growing technology gap prevents your business from staying competitive and responsive to its customers.
Fortunately, many top companies have discovered a new approach to modernizing their applications to the latest technologies while preserving business-critical functionality.
Synchrony Systems’ Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP) delivers this new solution in a fast, secure, and affordable way.
Only MLP integrates knowledge, process, and tools to rapidly modernize your in-house applications.
With MLP, your business is not only able to close the technology gap, it will never fall behind again.
Technology constantly reinvents itself. With modern applications, your company is ready to thrive in the competitive marketplace.
Is aging technology holding back your business? Contact us today for an initial assessment.
Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP) earns prestigious industry recognition
Greenwich, CT (May 6, 2019) Synchrony Systems, a leader in legacy application modernizations, today announced that MLP was named a 2019 SIIA CODiE Awards finalist in the Best Emerging Technology category. Finalists represent the best products, technologies, and services in software, information and business technology.
MLP is a scaleable, cloud-based platform for managing and executing end-to-end migrations and modernizations of legacy IT applications to modern software architectures and platforms. It enables automated code conversion, transformation, remediation and upgrades of millions of lines of code in minutes, ensuring consistent, reliable, and repeatable results. With MLP, upgrading and modernizing legacy applications is no longer disruptive to the business. There are no code freezes of ongoing development since MLP enables parallel upgrades and modernization to run concurrently and continuously with development.
The SIIA CODiE Awards are the premier awards for the software and information industries and have been recognizing product excellence for over 30 years. The awards offer 76 categories that are organized by industry focus of education technology and business technology. MLP was honored as one of 137 finalists across the 44 business technology categories.
“The 2019 CODiE Award finalists are some of the most innovative, high-impact products in the market. We are thrilled to place a spotlight on these innovations and the power they have to transform the future of how we do business.” said Jeff Joseph, President of SIIA.
“We are excited that MLP is a finalist in the Best Emerging Technology category,” said Slavik Zorin, Founder and CEO of Synchrony Systems. “Battling technical debt is a large challenge for IT departments across all industries and will only continue to grow as today’s leading-edge technology is tomorrow’s legacy. MLP provides a technology-agnostic, systematic approach and a uniform process for migrating and upgrading mission-critical proprietary business applications while maintaining 100% functional equivalence and without disrupting the day-to-day business operations. It’s an honor to be recognized by the CODiE judges for our vision and accomplishments thus far.”
The SIIA CODiE Awards are the industry’s only peer-recognized awards program. Business technology leaders including senior executives, analysts, media, consultants and investors evaluate assigned products during the first-round review which determines the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners. Winners will be announced during the Business Technology & Company CODiE Award Winner Announcement Party immediately following TechConText, June 12 in San Francisco.
The SIIA CODiE Awards is the only peer-reviewed program to showcase business and education technology’s finest products and services. Since 1986, thousands of products, services and solutions have been recognized for achieving excellence. For more information, visit siia.net/CODiE.
About Synchrony Systems, Inc.
Synchrony Systems has been helping companies modernize their legacy, mission-critical applications for over 20 years. Their extensive experience, deep belief in automation while maintaining agility, and desire to develop a more systematic way to modernize has resulted in the world’s only Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP). For more information, visit sync-sys.com/.
Greenwich, CT (November 12 2018) — Synchrony Systems, Inc., a leader in legacy application modernizations, today announced that their CEO Slavik Zorin was the featured executive in the Software and Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) Vision from the Top. This program gives members a glimpse into what drove the success of these industry leaders. At the end of the year, all interviews will be released in the form of an eBook.
An excerpt from the interview can be found below. The full interview can be found here on the SIIA website.
Interview Excerpt:
Jennifer Carl: Over the past twenty years what advances have you seen in the modernization of software?
Slavik Zorin: If I look back over 20 years and think about the trends, it has really all started with the mainframe or the “big iron”, where all application software was developed, maintained and run, all in one single place. Over time, this monolithic computing power has been supplemented by more granular and distributed computing power, namely the personal computers and network operating systems. This marked the beginning of an architectural revolution, away from large and monolithic systems, and towards highly distributed and scalable systems that are more flexible, and easier to develop and deploy – what is today’s microservices architecture.
As the rate of change in technological advances continues to accelerate, especially as we look at technologies such as Big Data and AI, we are beginning to approach the age when software will be able upgrade and modernize itself. This will not only become transformational, but also disruptive to the service-driven businesses and migration companies alike. As this future begins to unfold, Synchrony’s MLP platform must play an important role in managing a large number of application modernizations across diverse programming languages and platforms, incorporating the required knowledge and systematic process in order to achieve a frictionless and continuous modernization of application software.
Jennifer Carl: You are a technologist at heart. What is sparking your interested at the moment, and how does it apply to Synchrony?
Slavik Zorin: Lots of things interest me in the industry. IoT, for example, is extremely interesting and incredibly empowering evolution of technology in terms of the benefits it’s going to deliver to the world. We are going to be able to monitor everything—agriculture, logistics, automobiles, medicine, our homes, our health, you name it… But It’s not just about the monitoring; it’s the massive amount of real-time data collected from these miniature IoT devices, and the harnessing of this data that will foster progress, global prosperity, and change the way we interact with each other and the world.
But it is the intersection of machine learning (ML) or AI, if you prefer that term, accompanied by the big data analytics, where we see the possibilities for Synchrony Systems. As the MLP platform and its ecosystem expands to manage hundreds and even thousands of modernizations, the knowledge of how systems are built will grow geometrically making the perfect place to apply ML. Imagine taking a monolithic system and having a really powerful learning and inference engine intelligently extract business rules, APIs, and turn a monolithic application architecture into a scalable microservices architecture.
Blockchain is another disrupting technology that might have interesting applications in our business. A well understood measurement of software applications is lines of code (aka LOC). LOC is also the way we compute the underlying intrinsic value when transforming LOC from one programming environment to another. We can imagine a digital currency based on LOC that can emerge and be used to transact within our ecosystem. This is something we are keeping tabs on and might play a role in creating.
The full interview can be found here on the SIIA website.
Mobile devices have changed the face of collaboration. Alert notifications and instant access are now ubiquitous and user-friendly in a wide range of apps for banking and finance, shopping, travel planning, and dating—the list is endless. Because these features are also penetrating the B2B world, access to team members is now only a tap away.
Platforms for workforce collaboration are taking productivity to the next level. Slack is among the premier platforms to provide customization and extensibility through APIs for collaboration integration with 3rd party apps. At Synchrony, we have leveraged Slack capabilities to create a just-in-time process collaboration workflow for software modernization projects.
Collaboration shift-left
Today the common practice is for users to log in and navigate through dashboards to get the latest project data or check the next assigned task. The integration of Synchrony’s Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP) with Slack collaboration takes the notion of shift-left to the next level: project stakeholders are aware of events sooner and can respond faster, as an integrated collaboration eliminates intermediate steps. With these features, modernization team members have access to the latest project data and can interact with the project’s workflow and fellow team members—right from their pockets—by responding to project events that are pushed by the collaboration service event bus.
Let’s take the system administration functions as an example. Empowered by Slack’s slash commands, sysadmin members now have access to a command-line interface to quickly inquire and control cloud compute and storage resources from their mobile phones. Events from cloud monitoring services, such as the AWS Cloud Watch, will inform administrators about resource constraints and allow resolution through Slack interactive messages. These message responses are routed through the custom Slack MLP App to Node.js services that manage resources through the cloud service APIs.
Modernization developers and testers also can collaborate using Slack messages. When a tester adds a new defect from the MLP TestLog user interface, a message is broadcast on the project’s channel and the developers immediately get the notification. Once a fix is available and delivered to the project’s repository, the project lead gets an interactive message that the automated workflow is ready to process the fix and can initiate the tasks directly from Slack. The Slack interaction will be visible to other team members, and the MLP user interface will also reflect the workflow progress. Upon completion of automated tasks, the project manager can respond to the availability of a new automated task by assigning resolved defects and test cases back to testers for verification—all within Slack.
Project managers also have the ability to create event subscriptions based on event types, users, event data, and calendar information. The subscriptions are processed by the MLP collaboration services that gather project metrics and push them to the Slack user interface. For example, an event subscription can be created to produce a just-in-time notification of the project metrics for a weekly project review meeting with various stakeholders. The metric results will get pushed onto the project’s channel, with a link back to the MLP metrics UI that will allow project stakeholders to instantly drill into the metric details during the meeting.
Distributed team collaboration
Modernization projects are often carried out by multiple teams whose members are typically customers, solution providers, and system integrators. These teams perform tasks such as project management, migration tools development, application migration, build, deployment, and delivery to testers, testing, and quality assurance, etc. MLP supports this ecosystem through project and task workflow configuration, and solution configuration and release. Project issues can be redirected to solution providers, who can respond to notifications by creating and delivering new solution releases that generate Slack notifications. These, in turn, enable authorized team members to automatically install updates and run the project workflow with the latest changes. Subsequently, testers are notified of the availability of the latest updates and can proceed to validate the delivered fixes.
The usage of Slack channels enables all stakeholders to keep the project’s pulse and to track all its activities in a central location. Slack’s latest search/filter capabilities enable users to quickly identify project events of interest and evaluate their current state. Project managers can see the testing activity and track responses from developers. Channels also include shared conversation among project stakeholders that enables turning these conversations quickly into actionable items. For example, a message with a screenshot from a customer can be turned into a defect/task using a Slack action.
The effect of pushing the available project data to all stakeholders begs the following question: what’s the next step in productivity? Each modernization project is unique, but all projects develop patterns over time and note common factors that are ripe for mining, such as testing/fixing patterns, release patterns, etc. Machine Learning integration is definitely the future. Perhaps notifications will take the form of recommendations about how to adapt the work, based on project circumstances. But that’s for another blog post…
If your team is ready to take advantage of today’s leading collaboration tools for your modernization project, Synchrony can help.
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.
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.”
