Top banks respond to growing competition by modernising legacy systems

21 October 2011

Top banks respond to growing competition by modernising legacy systems


MigrationWare, a Micro Focus partner and a leader in the field of application migration and modernisation, reports that it is witnessing a surge in interest on the part of many leading organisations with respect to application migration and modernisation.


MigrationWare, a Micro Focus partner and a leader in the field of application migration and modernisation, reports that it is witnessing a surge in interest on the part of many leading organisations with respect to application migration and modernisation.

Surprisingly perhaps, this interest is also coming from organisations traditionally regarded as cautious with respect to the adoption of new technology.
Understandably, banks have generally been regarded as cautious decision-makers with respect to technological change. It is therefore interesting and worthy to note that many of the world's leading banks are starting to pay particular attention to technology that would help them modernise business-critical applications.
 
This point is emphasised by the fact that, in addition to the top 10 global banks, South African household names like Standard Bank and Nedbank have turned to Micro Focus technology to help with modernising their business-critical applications. These organisations, and a number of other leading banks around the world - such as ABN-AMRO, Barclays, Banco di Desio, DnB Nor, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS and Standard Chartered Bank - have adopted more flexible IT environments with a view to improve staff productivity, customer satisfaction and time to market for new services.
 
Micro Focus technology offers a broad range of modernisation and legacy migration strategies that help banks make the most of their existing IT investment in the enterprise applications that are at the heart of their business. Its application portfolio management and application analysis tools provide vital information to identify and maximise the value of applications.
 
Micro Focus' solutions enable banks to migrate business-critical mainframe modernisation across applications, development and testing to more modern and cost-effective platforms based on Windows, z/OS, Linux or Unix, without sacrificing the business logic that makes these applications unique.
 
A key driver of these initiatives seems to be the coming together of the need to reduce the costs of IT, and at the same time deliver more to increasingly demanding IT users. These changing priorities are reflected in a recent report by Gartner, “Financial Services CIO Agenda 2011”, showing that financial institution CIOs' top three strategic priorities are developing and maintaining a flexible infrastructure, delivering projects that enable business growth, and reducing the cost of IT.
 
As a migration project specialist, MigrationWare offers deep expertise and experience with respect to the execution of migration and modernisation projects. “Choice has become a defining characteristic of the IT industry, and this is especially true for platforms,” says Joao de Oliveira, director of sales at MigrationWare. “We are entering a new era where established rules are being challenged and where past norms are being questioned. With respect to choice of platform, workloads that in past times were regarded as being platform-specific, today could rightly be considered for deployment on a variety of platforms.”
 
IT organisations face internal pressures from tactical investment programmes, a need to lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and a demand not to be locked into a single platform vendor. For most, the important measure is the TCO - both the initial investment charges and recurring annual hardware and software maintenance. The pressure is on to maximise ongoing value, while removing cost and platform complexity.
 
Increased commoditisation puts portability centre-stage. Increases in processor power and hardware commoditisation present IT buyers with choices when it comes to platform selection: Windows, Linux, Unix, PC or Mac, desktops or VMs, mainframe or non-mainframe, iSeries, data centre or cloud. Exploiting this choice lowers TCO.
 
“The banking industry is entering an era of intense competition, as customer expectations become ever more sophisticated. Whether you're a high-street bank or an investment house, customers are demanding 24/7 access to data on a growing range of devices, which poses all kinds of availability and security challenges,” said Stuart McGill, CTO of Micro Focus.
“The business logic embedded in institutions' existing applications is often a key source of competitive advantage, meaning they need to find ways to get the most out of these existing IT assets, at the same time as developing more agile applications that can drive business growth.”

MigrationWare

MigrationWare specialises in modernising legacy code and aging IT infrastructure by transforming and extending existing valuable investments in IT onto contemporary, open, more cost-effective environments or software languages. Through its commitment to automating the conversion and migration process, MigrationWare reduces to a minimum the costs and risks associated with IT rejuvenation projects.

Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernisation, Testing and Management software enables customers' business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information, please visit www.microfocus.com.