Experienced “legacy” developers are either retiring from the workforce or switching to work in newer technology fields to remain competitive. Educational institutions are no longer focusing on “legacy” technologies. As a result, the pool of available personnel to support many older systems continues to dwindle increasing the risk of “the one programmer who knows it, getting hit by a bus.” Converting your legacy language code to more widely used industry standard languages provides the option of choosing from a larger pool of programming talent.
Applications written in different programming languages can require licensing fees for each language compiler and/or runtime environment. By consolidating languages, businesses can shed some or all of their language licensing expenses.
Some languages are heavily integrated with a particular operating system and/or hardware. Industry standard languages run on a wide variety of platforms providing the flexibility of moving portions or all of an application to another platform with greatly reduced effort.
Automated code conversions result in consistent coding styles in terms of code formatting and syntax, thereby reducing maintenance costs.
In addition to converting to a new language, specialized coding modifications can be implemented as code is converted. Datatek can tailor a converter for your business requirements. Global modifications are made in a consistent and accurate manner.
Converting code to a newer language does not change its logic. Applications will essentially look and function the same as they did before. (If the system platform is changing, businesses tend to see the benefit of major performance gains.) The cost of massive/company-wide retraining efforts is not required.
The industry is full of horror stories of companies attempting to replace their applications with off the shelf software packages. Migrations to these packages have proven to be extremely costly as it is determined during the project that the package does not support all the functionality the business’s original application contained. Costs increase as more customizations are required and more hardware is required to “fix” the performance problems as a system is tested with real users. Project timelines drag out, businesses start accepting they may have to live without prior functionality because they need to go live, and staff needs to be retrained. Business’s have expended large amounts of capital and manpower refining their applications to meet their needs. Those investments should be retained.
If you still have additional questions, we encourage you to call Datatek at 800-536-4835 and speak to one of our experienced project managers. You can also find answers to many questions on our FAQ page.
Datatek has successfully converted millions of lines of PL/I code. We will put our experience and insight to work for you.
Call 800-536-4TEK and speak to a Datatek project manager today!
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