Our Application Transparency Platform (ATP) is a revolutionary Natural rehosting and Adabas migration solution. It provides an end-to-end strategic pathway for lower licensing costs, higher productivity, and full preservation of Natural syntax and business rules.
CHALLENGES
Mainframes cost as much as 4,500 percent more to operate than equivalent Cloud counterparts. This figure is compounded by a scarcity of development resources and rising licensing and maintenance fees for ancillary mainframe utilities, applications, and databases.
Legacy databases are difficult to integrate with systems on modern platforms. This is because of inherent inextensibility, incompatibility, and rigidity of the underlying hardware and software powering these legacy systems.
Companies are rapidly moving to DevOps and the Cloud while consolidating their technology stacks to maximize IT performance. Unfortunately, the inflexibility of mainframes has become a growing hindrance to modern, continuously evolving, agile business.
OUR SOLUTION
You can retain your Natural code as-is while taking advantage of the cost savings and infinite elasticity of the Cloud by rehosting your legacy estate on our Application Transparency Platform (ATP).
Rehosting, sometimes referred to as replatforming, is ideal for companies whose applications are still meeting their business needs, and who therefore wish to retain their Natural development skills while moving away from non-relational databases and expensive mainframe infrastructure. By rehosting with ATP, your Natural code is migrated onto modern, distributed platforms, either on-premises or in the Cloud, without change. Underlying legacy databases are migrated to relational models, configured to seamlessly interact with your applications via ATP.
Organizations looking to move away from Natural can also use ATP to automatically refactor syntax to COBOL, Java, or C# on demand. As an alternative to re-engineering and conversion solutions available for Natural and Adabas, ATP dramatically reduces the timeframe for the replacement cycle and accelerates your return on investment.
ATP enables automated Adabas migration into the relational database of your choice, processing Natural applications using ATP Language (ATPL). ATP powers Natural rehosting seamlessly from the mainframe environment to a more economical and more robust ATP environment, thus reducing maintenance / licensing fees and mainframe workload. Since ATP interprets and executes each Natural command, the Natural applications can execute against the new relational database without changes to the Natural syntax.
Our eavJES batch execution suite, an ancillary toolset within the ATP rehosting software, provides a job execution system for organizations who want to preserve their JCL and procs, and continue to maintain them even when they move off the mainframe.
In addition, ATP includes a full-featured UI-based development platform that features Natural code analysis, flow diagramming, impact analysis, pattern matching, version comparison, and interactive debugging. The existing Natural development team can continue to develop and maintain applications as they always have with the support of modern development tools.
Retaining Natural syntax may be the final modernization goal for some organizations. For others, it might be a step in a phased approach to move away from procedural code and pre-relational databases altogether. ATP is designed to support customers regardless of how far down the modernization path their migration effort takes them. For migrations away from Natural, ATP supports automated refactoring to C#, Java, or COBOL through a simple right-click, SaveAs function. This is an industry first, bringing automated refactoring to the end user. Using this feature, it is possible to maintain the Natural, but choose to have the actual syntax converted to C#, Java, or COBOL at the time the syntax is saved by the developer. Once saved, the newly converted code is functionally equivalent to the legacy Natural syntax. This feature enables the best of both worlds; re-use of developers’ existing skill sets in Natural and their extensive knowledge of the applications, while deploying as C#, Java, or COBOL.
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“With Advanced, we were able to achieve our project goals within the timeline and budget specified at the outset of the project. The migrated applications acted exactly as expected, enabling us to integrate with internal and external systems as needed, with a level of performance we required. Plus, the modernized STARS can now deliver data in ways that will provide new value to customers countrywide.”
Li Phing,
Singapore Land Authority
by Tim Jones, Managing Director - Application Modernization
Over 35 years of Natural and mainframe modernization experience
Read our application modernization blogs