Breathing New Life Into Legacy Systems

OMG task force seeks to standardize methods for data, app transformation

By David Rubinstein

October 15, 2003 —

An RFP allowing interoperability among applications and data residing on different platforms and written in different languages is expected to be issued by Object Management Group Inc.'s Legacy Transformation Task Force at the organization's meeting next month in London.

Approximately 40 software vendors and customers are participating in the effort, according to William Ullrich, co-chairman of the group and president of Tactical Strategy Group Inc., a consulting firm specializing in organizational and information transformation.

The group is using a broad definition of what a legacy system is-"any production-enabled system regardless of language or platform is a legacy system," Ullrich said-because narrowing that down eliminates too many systems, he indicated. "There are organizations that will take you from .NET and Visual Basic to J2EE, or from Java to .NET and C#, so it's migrating from an accepted new modern platform to another accepted new modern platform," Ullrich said, demonstrating that legacy transformations involve more than moving data off of mainframe systems into more modern architectures.

In fact, companies such as WRQ, NetManage and Attachmate, with which Ullrich has had discussions, "clearly all should participate," he said. Marcus Nitschke, Attachmate's marketing vice president, said the company is in the process of joining OMG. "We're very much on board [with the OMG standards initiatives] and look forward to actively participating in the legacy transformation group," he said. "From a strategy perspective, it's interesting to see an industrywide effort to take a more standardized approach" to solving legacy issues, he added. Also already on board with the project are Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nortel and Unisys, as well as smaller companies such as KLOCwork, a source-code analysis and design tools vendor; and Anubex, a migration methodologies and migration tools company.

The first step in legacy transformation, Ullrich said, is the analysis of existing applications and systems, as well as the intangibles that help provide an understanding of the scope of the legacy environment. The intangibles could be business processes, or a function called "pricing," he explained.

So the first RFP (www.omg.org/docs/lt/03-09-01.pdf) calls for an interoperability metamodel that allows a cross-section of an organization's applications, that typically are written in two or three different languages and reside on a couple of different platforms, to be rolled into a common view. One of the goals is to allow information about the structure and assets of the legacy system to be shared among different vendors' tools, and give the vendors an opportunity to provide a transformation solution that can take advantage of other tools customers might already employ, he said.

The group's road map then calls for a second RFP to define target metamodels, such as J2EE or .NET, to which the defined legacy artifacts can be specified. Many of these metamodels already have been completed as part of other OMG efforts, Ullrich said. The third RFP will define mappings from the platform-independent interoperability metamodel to the targets, and the fourth RFP involves metrics that can be derived from the first three proposals, he said. As an example, Ullrich said an application could have 35 business rules that relate to it, and of those rules, 30 need to be redeployed in the target metamodel. This process can give an organization metrics it can use as it begins to redeploy the legacy assets, he explained.

Ullrich said the initiative is such an important one that companies such as MicroFocus and Relativity joined OMG simply to be involved in this effort. "We're not preaching to the choir," he said. "There are people coming in new who don't know any of [the older OMG standards]."

He did say that OMG's eMOF-Essential Meta Object Facility, which provides the minimal set of elements required to model classes in an object-oriented system-is the minimal level of Model Driven Architecture required to participate in creating the proposals, and the model definitions must be done in UML. "We want to leverage as much as we can from pre-existing work in OMG," Ullrich said. "You'll see the real convergence of these standards with the second and third [legacy transformation] RFPs."

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