The answer is yes! With Advanced’s expertise in the legacy modernisation market our clients have not only realised cost savings but reduced the risk in system failure and downtime.

Application modernisation is a thriving industry and fast becoming mainstream - 90% of our survey respondents have modernised mainframe workloads in the past three years vs 11% who undertook modernisation initiatives before 2020.

Our customers have seen a 66% reduction in run costs. You can view all our case studies here.

Success depends, however, on careful migration partner selection; choose experts with a demonstrable track record of mainframe modernisation success. See question 3 for more information.

Given that organisations typically only undertake one or two modernisation projects in a 10-year period its critical to make sure you can lean on the experience of a partner whose focus is delivering successful modernisation projects.

Advanced has successfully completed over 500 modernisation projects worldwide across all sectors and technologies for the past 40 years. Our team of experts are ready to show:

• A verifiable track record of mainframe modernisation success
• Full support of your internal team and modernisation project throughout the entire process
• The tools, software and expertise to deliver a high-quality solution, including discovery and planning processes to minimise the risk of modernisation

Discover more by watching our on-demand technology webinars.

TIP: When comparing partners make sure you’re assessing like for like. For example, Advanced includes data migration in our project scope and pricing - offering a turnkey solution from start to finish whereas many others do not, leaving the customer to migrate their data, then deploy and fix any target state problems themselves.

Wherever there’s an existing application that's been there for decades and has been highly optimised to run on a mainframe, it’s only natural to worry about whether performance can be maintained or improved once modernisation has taken place.

The simple answer is yes; we deliver a truly like for like target state. With over 40 years’ experience in application modernisation, Advanced uses multiple approaches and strategies to ensure modernisation projects are a success.

Our solutions are 100% automated. There is no manual intervention between the code being loaded and the refactored code being produced. We can refactor code fast and consistently. Optimisation takes place in the tooling and not with the resulting code.

The first step is to arrange an application assessment. It provides stakeholders with valuable insight to inform modernisation decisions such as the chosen method of migrating the legacy estate to the target environment, and/or cloud readiness. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them. You can read more about the assessment process here.

Many companies begin their modernisation journeys by attempting to migrate legacy systems to their desired state using internal resources alone, but run into difficulties in their strategy as the true breadth and depth of the modernisation task reveals itself.

Code quality, project overrun, and inadequate expertise were the most cited unforeseen challenges to successful mainframe modernisation. As well as:

• Disconnect of priorities between technical and leadership teams: Despite the business benefits of modernising, there is a significant disconnect between the desire for technical teams to pursue these projects and the level of commitment they receive from leadership. From our recent survey, 38% report that leadership still lack an understanding the business benefits of cloud migration and IT in general.
• Technology tunnel-vision: Not ensuring business logic and technical use cases match between the legacy and target environment prior to migration.
• Unrealistic expectations: Where your partner promises more than can be realistically delivered.
• Internal infighting: Organisation politics can become a factor, especially if a project is sponsored by one group but opposed by others who need to be engaged for the project.
• Steep re-learning process:  If the modernisation effort is solely focused on the operational or system areas without looking at the enablement of employees the result is partial and incomplete modernisation.
• Inadequate planning: 11% of enterprises have blamed a lack of planning for modernisation failures.
• Poor understanding of the legacy environment

Understanding the details of an application and its interrelationships with other systems is a necessary step for modernisation. A challenge for many companies is that little documentation exists, or is current, for many applications.

It’s an important reminder that as part of their strategy, organisations should consult experienced specialists with modernisation project expertise and demonstrated track records of success to conduct deep assessments and develop air-tight strategies before embarking on any modernisation programme.

Read 10 steps to ensure a successful mainframe migration.

For the modernisation project to work, it’s vital to choose the right partner who’s going to collaborate with you. The partnership needs to consist of appropriate specialists/teams that are transparent, able to listen to each other and work together to reach their shared goals.

At Advanced, we take several steps to ensure that cross-functional teams understand potential challenges that may arise through the modernisation process. This understanding enables us to mutually plan mitigation tactics well in advance of a possible roadblock. The visibility and expertise required to accomplish this comes from our comprehensive Assessment process and the tooling that underpins it, paired with Advanced’s decades of modernisation experience.

You may be interested in reading The Modernisation Secrets of the Fortune 1000.