Data Sheet - Modernisation

30 October 2007

Northdoor alerts legacy IT users of escape route from skills crunch

Northdoor, an independent IT consultancy and provider of full lifecycle solutions primarily to the financial services industry, today announced an alert to institutions attempting to continue the maintenance and development of legacy IT applications in the face of the retirement, reducing availability and increasing cost of skilled legacy programmers.

Northdoor is advising organisations seeking people skilled in Gupta/Centura, Oracle Forms, Visual Basic 6, RPG, Delphi or PowerBuilder to instead consider application modernisation and transformation. Various tools recently developed to support such processes are now proving effective, especially with the support of 3rd party specialist consultancies such as Northdoor. Legacy applications can then subsequently be maintained and further developed using modern languages of better skill availability; languages such as Microsoft .NET or Java/J2EE which then also present the advantages of web-services and a service oriented architecture.

“A large number of organisations with legacy applications are finding it difficult to recruit the skills they require to continue maintenance and development,” said David Ballard, consultancy director at Northdoor. “Many firms are considering the expensive replacement of legacy systems when modernisation and transformation techniques could extend the life of their existing investments for many years to come, saving a great deal of money, disruption and risk.”

Of course, it is possible to rewrite certain legacy applications manually. However, Northdoor’s experience suggests modernisation and transformation techniques can accomplish such projects at around 20 per cent of the cost of an in-house manual re-development.

Northdoor recommends that legacy modernisation and transformations are considered within an overall strategy for legacy portfolio management.

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About Northdoor

Since Northdoor was founded in the City of London in 1989, the organisation has grown successfully through its commitment to quality, cost effectiveness and client service. Northdoor is an IT consultancy with a wide range of skills in infrastructure, applications and services, ensuring its ability to deliver sustainable solutions for clients throughout the IT lifecycle.  The company enjoys a reputation for delivering on time and to budget and has considerable expertise with implementing and designing strategic solutions.

For more information, please see www.northdoor.co.uk or call us on +44 (0)207 448 8500

Note: .NET is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All other product and company names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.