Legacy
Systems Integration
The
collapse of information hierarchies has fundamentally
altered the supply and demand dynamics relative to the
flow of information. Expectations have heightened greatly
- people now expect to have fingertip access to real-time
information regardless of where the information originates
or how difficult it is to provide access.
That
demand, however, is running up against an information
supply that's surrounded by high barriers to entry —
a diverse range of complex enterprise information systems.
Global 2000 companies have hundreds of them - representing
the supply - systems that were never designed to meet
such demand.
Legacy host platforms represent the vast majority of
those systems, as upwards of 70% of corporate data still
resides there. Legacy systems' sheer
complexity can present serious obstacles
and in particular, present special problems. For example,
source code is no longer available for many legacy applications,
and programming expertise is difficult to come by. Further,
such applications are usually mission-critical; meaning
that downtime for the purpose of new application development
is not an option.
Despite
the inherent barriers, IT managers are still focused
on the issue of how best to leverage their enterprise
applications to take advantage of the benefits of the
new information economy. Accordingly, Enterprise Application
Integration to Legacy Systems is a topic that's at the
forefront for these professionals.
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