cic commentary: the pivotal impact of development tools on ... · enterprise product set underpin...

© Creative Intellect Consulting Ltd 2013

CIC Commentary: The pivotal impact of development tools on mainframe Workload Management and Application Modernization

How the latest development toolsets expand the strategic options

A Creative Intellect Consulting Commentary This CIC Commentary has been prepared for Micro Focus to examine how the advanced capabilities of its Enterprise Product Set underpin modernization strategies, which were difficult or impossible until fairly recently. The report is aimed at development managers, senior developers and application architects in IT organizations with large, complicated legacy application portfolios deployed on IBM mainframes, and who are under inexorable pressure to modernize. We describe a set of strategies for integrating legacy applications quickly into a truly modernized environment, laying the foundations for adding state-of-the-art capabilities based on business priorities, virtually unhindered by legacy technical constraints.

Paul Herzlich, Principal Analyst, Creative Intellect Consulting

July 2013

Creative Intellect Consulting is an analyst research, advisory and consulting firm focused on software development, delivery and lifecycle management across the Software and IT spectrum along with their impact on, and alignment with, business. Read more about our services and reports at www.creativeintellectuk.com


Table of Contents

1. Summary messages .............................................................................................................. 3

The pressure to modernize is inescapable ......................................................................................... 3

The basic strategic choices.................................................................................................................. 3

Application development tools make an unexpected impact ............................................................ 3

Flexible deployment options .............................................................................................................. 3

2. What drives modernization? ................................................................................................. 4

Competition, technology and survival ................................................................................................ 4

The costs of doing nothing .................................................................................................................. 5

What is modernization? ...................................................................................................................... 5

3. Modernization strategies ...................................................................................................... 7

The tip of the modernization iceberg ................................................................................................. 7

Typical modernization strategies ........................................................................................................ 7

The power of state-of-the-art development environments ............................................................... 8

The case for immediate development modernization ....................................................................... 9

Moving beyond mainframe deployment ............................................................................................ 9

The impact of Workload Management on modernization strategy ................................................. 11

Limitations to Workload Management ............................................................................................. 11

4. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 12


1. Summary messages

The pressure to modernize is inescapable You’re under pressure to make IT more efficient, reduce cost, deliver more, and eliminate risk. But you find constraints along the away. There is a mountain of application work to be done just to keep the business running. Balance that with the cry for innovation from your business users clamoring for new capabilities that are only available with the latest generation of technologies. For them, IT’s ability to deliver mobile, media rich and personalized applications, to take advantage of lower cost hardware platforms and to respond quickly to the market are imperative for survival in a globally competitive world. Even if you have fended off the pressure to renew, replace or extend your legacy applications until now, modernization of your mainframe applications to make them “fit for purpose” is unavoidable.

The basic strategic choices There are many ways of plotting a course through the complicated task of modernizing your applications, but some routes are better than others. Starting over – rewriting or moving to a packaged application – is an option, but one that may cost a fortune and expose the business to significant risk. Another typical approach is to build new front ends for legacy applications. You treat the back end as a black box, trying to introduce new front-end features with as little impact on the black box as possible.

The strategy that often fits best is an incremental change of your existing applications and the processes that manage them, in order to reduce the maintenance backlog and ensure that the applications have the flexibility and agility that the business needs. This allows you to build on the investment you have in existing applications and is lower risk than starting over. The key to making this strategy work is having the right tools.

Application development tools make an unexpected impact The latest in application development tools open up surprising possibilities for formulating a modernization strategy. Compared to today’s predominant application development environments – Eclipse and Visual Studio – mainframe development tools look as outdated as their legacy application counterparts. A new approach from Micro Focus with their Enterprise Developer for zEnterprise, brings legacy language support to the mainstream, state-of-the-art IDEs, which not only benefits your mainframe application development through the productivity focus these tools have, but also adds new options for modernization strategies that have not generally been considered in the past.

Start by offloading mainframe development and testing to Enterprise Developer to take advantage of more productive tools and to help cut through the backlog of maintenance tasks, freeing up significant development and test MIPS for production use in the process. Then you have options.

Flexible deployment options Discrete “fit for purpose” mainframe applications that are easily isolated can be deployed very quickly in the native target environment. Once those applications are moved, you have a working base to integrate them further into the capabilities you may be looking for, such as Internet, Mobile or Cloud type infrastructures.

When you have a complex portfolio of applications with a high MIPS dependency, it becomes difficult to justify the work involved in a complete migration off the mainframe. Even if you could port the code with almost no change, the interfaces and interdependencies can become impossible to unravel and your strategy and planning end up in a deadly embrace. Micro Focus Enterprise Developer, with the mainframe application server Enterprise Server, enables you to run production applications on or off the mainframe whilst maintaining connections across the environments. This balanced approach gives you enormous flexibility. Inter-dependencies are more easily resolved, and you can plan your mix of ported applications with prime time core business applications based on business priorities, rather than technical limitations.


2. What drives modernization?

Competition, technology and survival Competition and technology place relentless pressures on organizations to modernize their IT.

Organizational survival in industry and commerce depends on constant adaptation to market conditions. An organization is expected to perform well and to constantly improve, whilst maintaining – or more often reducing – costs and increasing profitability. The need to keep pace extends beyond the world of commerce into government, education, health and non-profit sectors as well. In the public sector, politicians have become ruthless in wielding the axe on agencies and departments that don’t perform. And in a globalized world, numerous competitors are waiting to outperform you and are ready to mount a challenge from anywhere.

Technology has a wide-ranging effect on many aspects of competitiveness. New computer technologies are a source of cost advantage in delivering products and services and in marketing and administration. They are the instruments of innovation and market expansion. They are agents for improving responsiveness, agility and time-to-market.

Figure 1 – Modernization drivers

If technology is such an enabler, how does it also exert so much pressure to modernize? Simple. The arrival of each new technology becomes a ‘must-have’. Either you take advantage of it, or a competitor will use it to their advantage.


The costs of doing nothing Sweeping change is expensive and disruptive. But can you afford to do nothing? Putting aside the imperatives driving you into modernization, living outside the technological mainstream is costing you in a whole host of ways:

• You must keep reviewing and updating your infrastructure to at least keep in step with external advancements, because you are at risk while you depend on obsolete hardware and unsupported system software, databases, middleware and security.

• You maintain legacy development tools for COBOL or PL/I software development with a raft of side effects: they are less capable, less integrated and less productive tools than those available for mainstream languages.

• You – and perhaps even your IT service partners – find it difficult to recruit staff, provoking a skills crisis for maintenance of existing systems; once-dominant COBOL programming has become a niche skill and lacks pulling power for new recruits.

Although sometimes restraint is the best course of action, doing nothing is unlikely to be a successful strategy for survival in the world as it now is.

What is modernization? The explosion in technological possibilities has meant that modernization today is no longer about a straight migration to an up-to-date platform, nor is it about adopting a SOA architecture or even wrapping new user interfaces around legacy systems. The technology for delivering IT functionality has been utterly transformed in the last decade, with profound effects on the role of IT within business.

• A rich, interactive, globally accessible Internet has made it possible to reach customers, employees and business partners directly and at low cost. The resulting boom in self-service applications, access anywhere and shared services has eliminated huge business processing costs.

• Mobile devices and Big Data create chances for previously undeliverable products and services.

• New paradigms for client and employee engagement, such as social media, collaboration and app store distribution, improve communication, ease of contribution and democratized participation.

• Cloud deployment transforms operating costs and brings new levels of speed, flexibility and responsiveness to IT service provision.

Modernized applications must give users – both customers and staff (internal and external) - the experience they now automatically expect. Applications must be:

• Globally accessible– at home, on premises, on the road, at client locations, at supplier locations – without compromise in capability.

• Media rich – the GUI is as dated and unappealing as the green screen; you need to be able to display products, technical drawings, travel locations, real estate, and other rich content taking advantage of, for example for maximum impact, video, 3D, augmented reality and the latest in CSS transitions and animation.

• Mashed, integrated, interlinked – features like maps, the weather, travel instructions, address look-up, market prices, site-wide search are expected to accommodate the user’s widest needs within your application.


• Personalized – the user expects to customize their workspace, and their preferences to be remembered; not only via their choices, but also dynamically via their behavior. They also expect to be able to turn such tracking off.

• Community aware – the user expects to share opinions, experiences, ratings, media and documents.

Mobile access has become emblematic of a modernized application. The expectations around mobility are typically demanding. They include:

• Portability from desktop across devices.

• Seamless operation across platforms, including sharing of user preferences and responsive screen layouts.

• Support for users’ own devices (BYOD).

• Application Store model for distribution.

• Capabilities that exploit the added value of smart devices, for example, spatial orientation, geolocation, in-built photography and sound recording.

Wide access, a more threatening world and greater concerns about data privacy and secrecy make security an overarching concern across all the technologies.

What modernization means to your legacy applications is that automated support for your core back and front office business processes alone is no longer sufficient. It necessitates a total upgrade of the capabilities and role of computing in business. What is possible has become what is expected, and what is expected is imperative for matching or beating the competition. It entails a daunting amount of change, and devising a sound strategy is a major challenge.


3. Modernization strategies Adopting a new architecture, platform, technology or process has a cost, is risky and takes time. There are many ways of going about it and some options are better than others.

The tip of the modernization iceberg Modernization is to deliver applications that exploit the up-to-date technologies that have become essential for competing today, and growing and evolving the business in the future. Business applications are at the core of modernization, but modernizing applications is just the tip of the iceberg.

Modernized applications, in turn, require the right platforms and infrastructure capable of supporting them. The mainframes that hosted legacy applications in the past are not necessarily the right platforms for the new technologies, both because of the capabilities they offer and cost. Mainframes are expensive and that is why it is important to ensure that the applications that use today’s advanced mainframe technology are fit and optimized to keep the running costs down, and also that the processes used to maintain and enhance these applications are similarly streamlined. New platforms need modernized system support, and new applications require modernized application development support. Even if they will cost less in a modernized configuration, they will be part of the modernization strategy.

System and infrastructure management modernization is not problematic. Non-mainframe platforms that support new technology infrastructures – Cloud or otherwise – have industrial strength systems and operations management. They can match the mainframe environment in manageability and beat it on cost.

The situation for application development modernization is even better. Non-mainframe tools and processes for application development simply outclass their mainframe counterparts and are tuned to modern development methods and processes, such as Agile. As you examine modernization strategies, it is essential to take into account the opportunities and benefits of modernizing application development. It should be a prerequisite.

Typical modernization strategies Some companies can justify the risk and expense of rewriting or replacing their legacy applications wholesale. An organization might choose such a strategy in conjunction with a complete overhaul of their business processes. However, in order to avoid disruption, most choose a more incremental strategy:

• The risky options: package replacement or application re-write

For many managers, the perceived straightforward solution is to rewrite COBOL or PL/I applications in a modern language on a new platform or to replace them with a package such as those from Oracle or SAP. Rewriting or replacement are both valid approaches, but can be expensive and are highly risky. If developing your COBOL application was a major effort many years ago, imagine what it would entail to reproduce the finely tuned business rules embedded in your application today. Many organizations have neither the business nor IT skills – nor documentation – required to reproduce the business rules embedded in their existing applications. Even approaches that purport to ‘re-learn’ an application from code require serious intervention from your business users and a major testing effort.

The conundrum is this: How can you preserve the value of your core applications, but modernize them with the least risk and cost?

• A pragmatic approach: strategic application re-use

Existing core business systems have been developed over many years and have accumulated a significant spend in terms of dollars and resources to keep them current. While these applications


may appear dated, have become arguably overly complex, and can consume unnecessarily high CPU resources, they are in many cases fundamental to the success of the business. It is important to weigh up the costs of moving, the reliability of the centralized system, and the investment in skills already in place. It is not an all or nothing approach.

Providing longevity and improving the value of these applications is an increasingly common approach for modernization. But their drawbacks need to be overcome to make them relevant to today’s business needs quickly and at low cost. Using traditional development techniques on the mainframe will only add to the “mountain of work” holding innovation back. It does not solve anything and just adds pressure on the already fully engaged IT department. The mould needs to be broken and at the same time the “lights need to be kept on”.

• How do you identify and prioritise modernization projects?

Most mainframe based IT shops have a large number of applications in their portfolio. It is often difficult to see through the volumes of business function that are stacked up when determining the optimal applications to take forward for modernization, which deliver the best value to the business. A thorough assessment of the inventory is required.

Using analytical technology like Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer applications can be assessed to determine some key facts to help define and prioritize your journey towards modernization. Complexity factors will show those applications that are expensive to maintain. Business rule mining will determine the key components that may be extended and integrated into vital systems built around the mainframe, and impact and integration analysis will determine the cost, scope, timelines and risk of a proposed modernization project.

From this analysis you can determine which applications can be componentized readily into an SOA environment, taking advantage of Web Services and the latest in middleware. You may determine that other applications just need to be simplified. And you will quite easily see those applications that may be better suited to running on a different platform, to be nearer the end users, to provide geographic agility, to take advantage of more flexible Business Intelligence (BI) databases, or simply to reduce running costs.

In all cases though, the applications will go through some degree of change from very little – other than testing in a new environment – to wholesale changes with business rule extraction, componentization, user interface changes and so on.

The power of state-of-the-art development environments A powerful first step in the journey is to introduce an application change environment that is cheaper, faster and more user friendly than today’s mainframe environment.

For more than 30 years we have had non-mainframe alternatives to mainframe tools for coding, compilation and testing of mainframe applications. Today we have sophisticated toolsets from Micro Focus and IBM Rational that bring mainframe development into state-of-the-art development environments and allow you to offload mainframe development and testing. The Micro Focus products are Enterprise Developer, Enterprise Test Server and Enterprise Server. The IBM products are IBM Rational Developer for System z family (RDz) with Rational Development and Test for System z (RD&T).

These state-of-the-art development environments include support for proprietary and open source tools for coding, testing and deployment. They run on Windows, UNIX or Linux, within the de facto standard environments, Visual Studio (Micro Focus only) and Eclipse. They consist of:

• Tools for smart code editing, instant compilation and linking, execution, trace and debugging that take full advantage of workstation computing power and are highly productive.


• The best and latest tools for source control management, continuous integration, automated build, and automated testing at unit, system and service levels.

• Integrated static and dynamic analysis tools that support refactoring and restructuring.

• Team-working environment that facilitates collaboration and is well suited to agile development processes.

The case for immediate development modernization There is a strong case for moving application development, both tools and processes, off the mainframe onto a modernized application development environment, before you embark on modernizing any applications. Off-mainframe development by itself may seem to leave you no better off for modernized applications, however, taking the first steps by introducing wider architectures to alleviate some of today’s mainframe issues does have inherent benefits.

Mainframe development consumes enough computing resources to make it worthwhile offloading it, to alleviate capacity constraints. And existing mainframe-based development processes are relatively cumbersome and can inhibit modernization progress to a point where it is not cost-effective. State of the art IDEs that include intelligent editing, immediate syntax checking and rapid compilation enhance programmer productivity and attract a wider pool of programming skills.

As organizations adopt alternative platforms to assist with the routine development, maintenance and testing of existing mainframe-based applications, they are taking significant steps towards being able to deploy those applications not only back onto the host, but also on other platforms associated with the zEnterprise, such as zLinux, pSeries and zBX blades.

Moving beyond mainframe deployment Offloading mainframe development and testing to current state-of-the-art development environments is just a first step. Micro Focus Developer, Test Server and Enterprise Server can take you several steps further through the transition and leave you perfectly placed with both development and deployment in a non-mainframe environment.

Discrete legacy applications for non-mainframe deployment The key to making an incremental migration practicable for modernization is the existence of a target platform that is easy to port to and then supports all the upgrade stages that follow. Micro Focus Enterprise Developer is the best example we know of software that creates such a platform on Windows, UNIX or Linux.

Enterprise Developer not only supports legacy code for deployment back on the mainframe, but also for deployment on Windows, Linux or UNIX. The product allows you to develop, compile and test COBOL and PL/I in Eclipse or Visual Studio. Not only can your code be created for JES or CICS/IMS environments, but it can also be extended to either native or managed code in the non-mainframe environments. The compiler accepts a large number of COBOL dialects and implements a vast range of COBOL and PL/I data types, so there is very little adjustment to code required in a ported application.

Enterprise Developer provides integration with nearly all the features of the state-of-the-art mainstream development environments. With that you get interoperability with code, objects and services in other languages. You can build composite COBOL and Java applications, for example.

Elevating COBOL from a perceived view as a legacy language helps deal with the problems surrounding skills. With COBOL as a .NET or JVM language in a familiar environment, you bring COBOL development closer to a new community of programmers. Your existing COBOL programmers enjoy a major skills upgrade, while


you preserve the investment in their COBOL programming skills and considerable knowledge of the application and the business.

Non-mainframe execution of complex legacy applications Enterprise Developer is a major help in enabling a manageable, incremental, lower risk modernization strategy to modernization. But when you cannot isolate an application for porting away from the mainframe, it is not the whole solution. Most applications have numerous and often complex interfaces. What do you do about mainframe components – and interfaces to mainframe components – not handled by Enterprise Developer alone?

A portfolio of mainframe applications will encompass many of the artifacts you are likely to find in a mainframe production environment – some dealt with by Enterprise Developer and some not: VSAM and QSAM files, CICS, CICS maps, IMS-TS and IMS-DB, DB2, Sort, JCL and JCL utilities, job spooling, programs in Assembler, PL/I, Java, 4GLs, packaged applications and external feeds and services. The administration and management tools for these components, such as map or screen compilers and DBA tools are also a part. The diversity and integration often make it extremely difficult to identify independent, manageable packages for migration.

Micro Focus Enterprise Server solves this problem. Enterprise Server provides the capability for running mainframe applications in the off-mainframe environment. It is also responsible for the communications interfaces that allow you to run with a mix of applications and components across mainframe and non-mainframe environments.

Using Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Server Enterprise Edition you can build a fully scalable production architecture for “fit for purpose” applications.

Figure 2 – Micro Focus Enterprise Server Reference Example Implementation for production on Windows


Interoperative Workload Management The ability of Micro Focus Enterprise Developer with Enterprise Test Server and Enterprise Server to support coding, testing and production opens up some tantalizing possibilities. It gives you the ability to code, test and execute mainframe applications on the mainframe and on an alternative non-mainframe platform interoperatively. For this approach, which we call Workload Management, to work:

• You must be able to deploy the same code on- or off-mainframe; you must not be required to ‘convert’ the application.

• The system components (like utilities) and application interfaces on the mainframe must be available in the off-mainframe environment.

• Your applications off-mainframe must be able to communicate with components and applications still residing on the mainframe and vice-versa.

This approach to Workload Management allows you at any given moment in your project deployment to have any mix of applications on or off the mainframe. The ultimate state is that an application can be coded, tested and run off the mainframe, without conversion, while it still maintains interfaces with components that still reside on the mainframe.

The impact of Workload Management on modernization strategy Your ability to vary how much development, testing and production execution you move off the mainframe underpins a truly flexible incremental modernization strategy. This flexibility is both at the level of whole applications and even within applications. Within an application, you can fine-tune how much to do off-mainframe: coding, coding and testing, or coding, testing and production. The strategic advantage is the ability to move applications selectively and incrementally off the mainframe even where you don’t have, or can’t have, cleanly isolated applications or clusters of applications.

Because you maintain communication between components running off and on the mainframe, you can prioritize and sequence your modernization deployment projects more closely to business rather than technical needs. You get the immediate benefits of moving development onto a smarter, cheaper and more productive environment. The ability to migrate applications initially, with little or no conversion effort, allows you to modernize more quickly.

Once your enterprise application development and production is migrated onto Micro Focus Enterprise Developer with Micro Focus Enterprise Server, which can be done with a minimum of change, you can take your time to add the up-to-date capabilities you have been thwarted in building until now. You will be able to do that in COBOL and diversify into other languages where technology or business process requires it.

Limitations to Workload Management There are some limitations to achieving the type of independence implied by Workload Management.

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Coverage of languages and middleware is extensive, but will never be total. Gaps will exist in support for 4GLs, for example. Many installations also have proprietary extensions to system components that will not be available off the mainframe.

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To some extent, execution across platforms depends on the existence of products that exist in both mainframe and non-mainframe forms and that behave identically. You can replace DB2 on zOS with DB2 on Windows, for example, but you may find that small differences in behavior create differences in results.

It may take a great deal of tuning to process your mainframe workloads on an alternative platform.


There is no out-of-the-box solution, but with the majority of the project covered, it narrows down the effort required to create tailored solutions to overcome the limitations

4. Conclusion

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The pressures to modernize your mainframe legacy applications to take advantage of new technologies and deliver capabilities that are essential to enterprises today are inescapable. Just as new technologies make it possible to deliver new functionality to application users, there is software to help IT with application modernization. The power of such tools gives them a strategic impact, particularly the Enterprise Product Set from Micro Focus.

Start your modernization process by understanding your application portfolio and look to modernize your application development. Move development off the mainframe while your applications are still deployed there. Enterprise Developer brings all the power of mainstream, non-mainframe, state-of-the-art IDEs to legacy language development. You will see immediate advantages in reducing mainframe loads for development and increased developer productivity, while positioning yourself within an environment for rapidly migrating and later modernizing applications.

Next, consider redeploying applications onto Windows, Linux or UNIX platforms. You can ‘convert’ quickly with Enterprise Developer and with minimum change by deploying with Enterprise Server.

If you have a complex portfolio of applications that are not easily isolated one from the other, take advantage of the power of Enterprise Server to create a production environment that integrates applications – and their related components – whether deployed on or off the mainframe. The capability to span environments enables you to focus your strategy on business benefits rather than technical constraints.

These lynchpins of modernization strategy are designed to reduce your risk, retain as much as you need of your existing IT investments and position you as quickly as possible on a modern platform, where you can build new capabilities in line with your business priorities.

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