In-Depth

Relativity charges ahead in legacy transform world

• By Jack Vaughan
• June 1, 2004

As germinating OMG standards for legacy transformation continue to gain attention, Relativity Technologies is promoting its platform for app modernization and management, and opening up its software to third parties.

Managers at Relativity say they are participating in standards activity around legacy, but suggest it is worthwhile for customers to move ahead in lieu of fully established transformation standards.

“Our business is about reducing the cost of maintaining, enhancing and modernizing legacy apps,” said Charles Dickerson, vice president of marketing and product management. “We’ve opened up our products to parsers and tools that perform analysis, identify business rules and transform languages.”

Although the company has an extensive background in services, it is ready to work with other service providers going forward. Assembler migration and comprehension software expert SML and automated legacy parsing specialist Trinity recently endorsed Relativity’s Modernization Workbench for application modernization and management.

“Now [these firms] can integrate with our Workbench [product] and use a common shared repository to access information,” said Dickerson.

As described by Dickerson, the course of architecture modernization standards may take a course similar to that of UML 2.0. In that case, vendors worked on RFPs, offered some of their homegrown technology for standardization, and began to implement software they felt represented the emerging theme of UML 2.0 ahead of actual standardization.

“The OMG is trying to define a way to model all of these systems. The vendors we are working with [in the Legacy Transformation PSIG] are responding to a call for proposals. As a group, we will create a response to the current RFP. A standard could be two years away. Instead of waiting, we will charge ahead,” explained Dickerson.

“We will monitor the standard,” he added. “We will be active participants in the development of the standard, but we need to build product right now.”

Please see the following related stories: “Web services and the mainframe” by Richard Adhikari

“User story: Raytheon on track” by Jack Vaughan