Legacy Transformation

The legacy transformation approach offered by Interactive Objects is an interesting option for legacy systems with less than 4-5 million lines of code. Project duration is typically between 9-18 months. As a result, unstructured legacy systems are transformed into well structured, easily maintainable and extensible systems running on modern platforms, such as J2EE.

iO's approach to legacy transformation is based on an industrial process, supported by an
end-to-end tool chain. The process is subdivided into three phases:

Harvesting (Abstract, Reduce): the key assets from the legacy system are identified and extracted. The result is a business centric application model.
Optimization (Re-Structure, Enhance): working on a high level of abstraction, concepts of object-orientation, componentization and SOA are applied to the model.
Forward engineering (Enrich, Refine): the application model is refined, and eventually mapped to the new implementation using advanced code generation techniques. The missing gaps are filled in though manual coding.

Because iO's approach combines a high level of automation with great flexibility, it significantly reduces cost and risk of typical re-engineering projects.

In addition to the basic legacy transformation, many projects aim to also introduce process-orientation into the new system. For example, many banks want to provide process-oriented portals to their employees, partners and customers. Consequently, the transformation project is accompanied by a Business Process Re-engineering project (BPR), for example leveraging BPMS (Business Process Management System) technology to control business processes in complex systems more efficiently. In this case, iO's basic transformation process is combined with the Process-to-Application (P2A) approach, which helps ensuring that the resulting, new system is process-enabled.

Finally, many customers want to use more flexible sourcing models for their legacy transformation projects. Legacy transformation is usually not suitable for a full-blown offshore approach, because too many interactions with the business are required. However, iO's Model Driven Offshoring (MDO) approach provides very good control over the offshore value chain and the work results, and is ideally suited to support iO's legacy transformation approach.

Additional links:

Legacy Transformation FactoryProcess to Application

Process-to-Application

Model Driven Offshoring