Our Automated ADSO Refactoring solution delivers modern Cloud-enabled applications and databases that are functionally equivalent to their legacy counterparts, eliminating the hassle and expense of ADSO, IDMS, ADSA, and the mainframe. This reduces cost, allows for deeper integration, and enables customization to meet business requirements.
CHALLENGES
Developers who understand ADSO, ADSA, IDMS, and mainframe technology are reaching retirement age and no one is trained to replace them, resulting in a steadily diminishing talent pool. As this shortage grows, the costs and risk of relying on these technologies will continue to rise.
Companies are rapidly moving to modern environments and practices such as DevOps and the Cloud. However ADSO, ADSA, IDMS and the underlying systems that support them were not designed for modern IT, resulting in difficult integrations and limited flexibility.
Mainframes running ADSO, ADSA, and IDMS cost as much as 4,500 per cent more to operate than equivalent Cloud counterparts. This figure is compounded by the rising licensing and maintenance fees for these specialized technologies.
OUR SOLUTION
Dealing with pre-relational network databases has long been the domain of specialist DBAs. Unfortunately, this talent pool is shrinking rapidly as IDMS specialists reach retirement age, creating scarcity, driving up maintenance costs, and compounding risk. As companies seek to migrate away from IDMS, they must also account for ancillary components such as ADSO, an abstraction tool used to develop modular applications using IDMS databases, when making the shift.
Our Automated ADSO Refactoring solution provides a turnkey modernization of your ADSO dialogs to object-oriented Java or C#, and your associated IDMS databases to relational models deployed to the Cloud or on premises. This service also includes IDMS-based application components such as process modules, maps, ADSA structures, edit and code tables, automatic editing, IDD messages, scratch and queue processing, and IDMS-DC language subroutines.
Our solution preserves the benefits of legacy systems while empowering organizations to leverage the advantages of newer platforms, especially the Cloud. This unlocks a whole new world of automation and scalability from automated testing to quality assurance, and the ability to leverage containerized deployments and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes.
Refactoring ADSO and its related components to object-oriented Java or C# presents many challenges. As such, our Automated ADSO Refactoring solution was designed with the following requirements in mind:
OUR PROCESS
We begin every modernization initiative with a discovery, free of charge. Our modernization experts work with you to understand and document your business and technical goals and objectives. Together, we gather information about your mainframe estate. Everything from infrastructure to language and database types and quantities are accounted for. The discovery concludes with a workshop where we recommend optimal modernization approaches based on information gathered. We will also provide rough order of magnitude (ROM) pricing, and estimated project durations and resource requirements.
The assess and design phase is performed using our automated tools to fully catalog and develop a complete understanding of the application, infrastructure, and operational components of a mainframe environment. It exposes mainframe artifacts that organizations did not know they had, relationships they did not realize existed, and assets that are no longer in use. Assess and design activities provide stakeholders with valuable insight to inform application modernization decisions such as disposition strategies and target environment architectures. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them. At the conclusion of the assess and design phase, all in-scope artifacts are accounted for, a detailed project plan is established, and the transformation process begins.
The transform phase includes the bulk of the automated ADSO, ADSA, and IDMS refactoring activities, the database and data modernization, and build-out of the target operating environment. During transform, we refactor pre-defined work packets, perform functional tests, and deliver them into the DevOps pipeline. While customer teams build, test, and deploy these work packets in the target environment, we refactor the next work packet, iterating until the entire mainframe estate has been transformed.
The test and deploy phase begins with the receipt of work packets through the DevOps toolchain as they are delivered from iterative refactoring activities in the transform phase. If issues arise, the work packet is passed back to us where we review the code, adjust our tooling, reprocess the work packet, and send it back into the DevOps pipeline to resume testing and deployment. This process repeats until the entire refactored estate has been deployed.
Prior to go-live, we refresh the target environment by transforming a final snapshot of the mainframe environment to account for changes that have taken place throughout the modernization project as part of normal business operations. Fortunately, since all adjustments and optimizations have been made to the automated refactoring tools and not the refactored code, this final refresh can be delivered into production over a weekend, eliminating code freezes.
We work closely with you and your team to ensure a smooth transition into production. Part of this transition includes the cooperative construction and testing of a go-live production cutover plan to reduce the potential risks associated with application deployments. We also provide on-demand assistance during the warranty period following production deployment, as well as post-transformation support of the modernized application.
"Advanced identified languages that nobody knew anymore in our assessment. It was critical information and their solution reduced the cost and the scope of this project greatly”
Marc Rubel, Executive Director of Application Development
GE Capital
We completed the assessment, ADS/O refactor to COBOL, database design and data migration which resulted in reducing run costs by 66%.
By joining this webinar you will discover how assessments provide stakeholders with valuable insight to inform mainframe modernization decisions.
Exploring the impact of the new era of digitalization and change on the current state of legacy systems and organizations' modernization plans.
Live discussion: 2022 Mainframe Modernization Report
Know the details, reduce the risk
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Over 35 years of ADSO, ADSA, IDMS, and mainframe modernization experience
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