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• Good Enough" Isn't Good Enough Anymore

“Good Enough” Isn’t Good Enough Anymore

In the face of a business environment that is ever-changing and changing at an ever-increasing rate, the success of a business is becoming increasingly tied to its ability to do business in an open, highly dynamic, highly integrated way — sensing and responding to the changing market and to the changing demands of its customers. Legacy applications, which are self-contained and hard-wired with proprietary business logic and data, most often lack the flexibility needed to adapt to changing business requirements. Developed on and optimized for unique legacy platforms, they are difficult to integrate with one another or with emerging Web technologies.

Companies that once felt that their legacy applications were performing acceptably now find it unacceptable that aging, inflexible technology is becoming one of the main inhibitors in executing business strategy. Companies looking to develop new products and services and get them to market quickly are starting to see how legacy systems may be a bottleneck in this process. Other companies that are exploring growth through mergers or acquisitions are constantly frustrated by proprietary systems that may be difficult or impossible to integrate with those of a potential target or partner. And with recent changes in regulatory requirements complicating any potential strategic moves, businesses are starting to look at how their legacy systems may be slowing down their ability to comply with these regulations.

At the same time, the maintenance of these legacy systems is becoming an increasingly costly burden. In an era of dramatically reduced IT spending, legacy application maintenance represents a major fixed cost. A 2003 study estimated that 80 percent of IT systems were running on legacy platforms.1 And complicating the maintenance of these systems is the fact that the applications that they're running today are far different in form from the applications as they were originally developed. Years of enhancements and changes to the applications have increased their complexity and their proprietary nature. As the original developers of these applications retire, specific knowledge of these applications is lost to the enterprise. And at a time when companies are facing a general skills shortage, it is difficult to recruit new workers skilled in working on systems that may have been developed before they were even born.