New priorities for legacy systems
Tan Ee Sze
12/07/2007

Organisations have moved away from IT-centric considerations (such as cost savings and platform consolidation) as their primary focus for legacy systems, and are much more concerned with business-centric issues such as real-time access to legacy data, agility and flexibility to meet business demands.

These were some of the findings of a worldwide customer survey conducted by business infrastructure software company Software AG during the final quarter of 2006. More than 180 customer organisations' participated in the survey, which attempted to gauge customers' concerns about their legacy systems, as well as their future plans for those systems.

According to the findings, which have just been released, respondents no longer look predominantly to rewriting, replacing or outsourcing as the primary strategies for dealing with legacy systems. Modernisation is now the overwhelming preference.

The study also found that:

- More than 60 per cent of respondents were "very" or "extremely" concerned about "the flexibility of this [legacy] system to be quickly modified to meet changing business requirements."

- Nearly 60 per cent of respondents analysed were "very" or "extremely" concerned about "real-time interaction between this [legacy] system and other systems to support business process automation."

"The results of our recent global customer survey clearly show that legacy systems are being positioned by IT organisations as significant players in the new enterprise," said Joe Gentry, CTO of Enterprise Transaction Systems, Software AG. "Customers are no longer asking, 'How do we get rid of these systems?' Instead they are asking, 'How do we take the business value that already resides in our legacy systems and bring this value into our new enterprise architecture to deliver business results?' I believe that the trend toward SOA has a lot to do with this shift in attitude."

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