Re Legacy not dead yet.
Not sure the relevancy to G&K BUT I agree 100%
I work in the industry for 20+ years, the last 6 as as an independent computer consultant (damn tired of it I might add).
Charles Schawb (sp?) just reconverted their Client server system back to the mainframe for preformance reasons. I fully expect others to do the same. Conversion Deconversion Reconversion, I have seen it many times. The plain fact of the matter is that although Client Server may have cheaper MIPS prices and cheaper DASD (storage) prices, the effiency of those devices is NOWHERE near as good as on the mainframe. Take storage for instance, on the mainframe, in exceess of 90% utilization is COMMON! The CEO of ORACLE admitted that the 50% utilization of storage on Client/Server is poor. For reasons I can not explain, utilizations of greater than 50% are not common on other than mainframes. SO..... If you are 50% cheaper/device but take twice the number of devices WHY CONVERT?
<<Don't hold the funeral yet! People have been predicting the death of the mainframe for years, but not only hasn't it happened, there isn't even a good start. I don't remember the percentage, but the claim is that a staggeringly high percentage of the world's corporate data is still on the mainframe, a percentage high enough to make you wonder what everyone else has been doing all this time.
Big companies have a devil of a time getting rid of legacy applications because they are so huge and there is so much pressure for new applications, that there is little available to consider replacement, especially if it isn't really broken. This is the real potential for the right EAI tools since one can interface to the legacy apps, wrapping them in an API which is independent of the applications internals. This allows the new applications to move forward without concern, other than performance, for the clunkly legacy applications, and creates an environment where one can replace any one legacy application with a new one without the rest of the suite even knowing it happened. Not all EAI works this way, of course.>> |
