News

Relativity charges ahead in legacy transform world

• By Jack Vaughan
• February 25, 2004

As germinating OMG standards for legacy transformation continue to gain attention, Relativity Technologies is promoting its platform for application modernization and management, and opening up its software to various 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 applications," said Charles Dickerson, the firm's vice president of marketing and product management. "We've opened up our products to parsers and to other tools that perform analysis, identify business rules and transform languages."

Although the company has an extensive background in services, it is clearly 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 Technologies' 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.

Relativity is a member of an OMG committee working on architecture and modernization. "That's how we met some of the vendors we are working with," said Dickerson. He sums up the group's purpose this way: "The OMG's goal is to create a common meta model of any system." He said he shies away from the term "legacy."

As described by Dickerson, the course of architecture modernization standards may take a course similar to that of UML 2.0, another OMG-stewarded standard. In that case, vendors worked on Requests for Proposals (RFPs), offered some of their home-grown 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."