Hewlett Packard Co. is refreshing its portfolio of application modernization services, putting more emphasis on the incorporation or replacement of legacy applications within a service-oriented architecture (SOA), it announced Wednesday.
The services can help businesses improve the return on legacy applications by identifying which ones to re-engineer or re-host, and which to replace or retire, according to Paul Evans, HP’s worldwide director of application modernization services.
Pricing for the services will depend on HP’s estimate of the time required to carry out the work. Some are offered for a fixed price, with variations if the customer changes the scope of the work in progress, he said.
HP has formalized its application modernization processes to make them faster and cheaper for customers, by applying consistent methodologies, including some borrowed from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Evans said.
In addition, it has written code converters that can take legacy mainframe code and translate it into code for more modern Unix systems, he said. This automated conversion is possible for some systems from Fujitsu Ltd., NEC Corp., IBM Corp., and Unisys Corp., he said.
As well as helping speed up the processes, formalization lets HP keep the cost of the services down in other ways too, according to Terri Schoenrock, global managing principal in HP’s enterprise application services program office. It means the work can be performed by HP staff anywhere in the world, including in lower-cost locations such as Bangalore, Manila, Toronto, Dublin or Sao Paulo, she said.
The services draw on HP’s own experience of integrating legacy applications into an SOA, Schoenrock said.
“We have taken the experience that we have with our customers and internally, and packaged it into something that is faster,” she said. “We have formalized these services to support our SOA focus.”