This is the most important question that many CIO's who have as/400 applications are asking themselves. Why are they asking this?
Cost and risk. It costs a lot more money to write your own applications in house than it does generally to buy one off the shelf. The reason being that you have to hire people to write and maintain the code. That's where the risk comes in. If i lose the person who wrote the code then i also potentially impact my ability to enhance and support that same code at the same costs and quality.
Since the introduction of the as/400 in 1988 a lot of custom code has been written on the platform in RPG. The fact that the majority of this code is still around and in use, is testament toRPG itself which makes it possible for analysts with business knowledge, to write a large portion of the code.
In helping customers worldwide to analyse and re-engineer their RPG applications over the last 25 years Databorough has accrued a fairly unique knowledge of the size and characteristics of the this code base in general. we estimate that there is at least one billion lines of custom code in existence on as/400's worldwide.
Before any CIO can make an informed decision on what application strategy to adopt: rewrite, modernize, replace, exactly how much of this code is still relevant and unique to the business must be known. This is in terms of business rules, data model design and flow/process logic. Extracting this information quantitatively, narrating it and documenting it on a million lines ofRPG code that has been written over 20 years, would take 5 people who would need excellentRPG and analysis skills, at least one year working full time.
That's at least half a million dollars direct cost. That is of course if there were enough such people available to do this work over and above ongoing support and maintenance demands on these same applications.
Over the last decade Databorough has been enhancing X-Analysis to the point where it can now automatically extract, narrate and document business rules, data models and process/flow logic for entire systems. Some of the systems X-Analysis runs over currently have in excess of 50 million lines of code, some as little as half a million. The difference in extraction time is usually a couple of hours.
The added benefit is that these extracted specifications can then be used to map to off-the shelf apps, as input specs for rewriting the unique and relevant parts, and even to automatically re-engineer the existing code where necessary.
This might make it clearer as to why IBM promote and use X-Analysis themselves in conjunction with their own tools, a few links to this are detailed below. There are also a few of our partners and independent agents who are offering modernization assessment services which help start this process. Some of these include, Sirius, ADC-AustinTech, IBM Global Services, and Oxford International.
So CIO's don't need to guess or accept others guesswork. They can make these critical decisions on provable, current, accurate and quantifiable information.
Here are a couple of useful links:
Stuart
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