Accelerating enterprise transformation with architecture-driven modernization

By Philip Newcomb

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the quest to achieve computers that equal or exceed human performance on complex intellectual tasks. A phenomenal development in AI is the recent emergence of automated computer language translation programs that can transform legacy information systems into state-of-the-art modern information systems, accomplishing tasks in hours that previously required hundreds of man-years.

The extreme need to modernize the nearly a half trillion lines of increasingly obsolete legacy software is the key driver for both human and computerized software translations.  Unfortunately the early software translators of the 1990s, like the earliest chess programs, were limited and disappointing.  Manual translation was little better and extraordinarily expensive. Plagued by high costs and failure rates approaching 90%, it is little wonder that legacy software modernization earned a bad rap as a risky endeavour to be avoided.

But just as AI based chess playing systems eventually arose that could defeat even the strongest grandmasters, computer scientists have leveraged AI to achieve quality and precision in language translations that now rival the highest skilled humans. The advent of multi-core 64-bit computers with vastly expanded memory and storage size increased the scale of translations making automated modernization of multi-million line systems both achievable and routine. Modular reusable frameworks have arisen built upon emerging industry standards and advances in software parsing, modelling and transformation technologies. As a result factory-style architecture-driven modernization of most legacy languages into object-oriented languages is now available from leading vendors.

Automated software translation is undergoing a renaissance propelled by an impressive series of successes across a broadening swath of industries. This renaissance is upending the conventional wisdom that lead to costly and failure-prone manual rewrites, disastrous COTS implementations, and worthless slap-on SOA wrappers.

Today no prudent CIO would seriously consider manually rewriting a major legacy system without first evaluating the broad range of modernization solutions available from a rapidly growing cast of vendors of modernization products and services. A standout among these modernization solution providers is The Software Revolution, Inc. (TSRI), a Kirkland, Washington based company that has racked up a remarkable track record of successful projects, a few of which are described briefly below:

European Air Traffic Management System, Thales Air Systems: This real-time system manages over 10 million passenger flights annually. TSRI transformed 1.7 million lines of legacy Ada into real time Java. The result was a perfect functional replica of Eurocat in Java.  TSRI's fully automated transformation of Eurocat eliminated the risk of errors inherent in a manual rewrite.

Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, U.S. Army, Stanley and Associates (Now CGI): TSRI employed JANUS Studio^® to transform this system of over 7+ million lines of legacy Ada-83 into Java in only 10 months.

Patriot Missile - Fire Platoon Simulation & Battalion Simulation Support Systems, Raytheon: TSRI modernized four variations of this system consisting of nearly one million lines of FORTRAN into C++.

A Major Health Care Insurance Company: TSRI modernized 2+ million lines of this health care provider system from PowerBuilder and MagnaX into Java running in a SOA architecture using Hibernate for Object Relational Mapping. This project was completed in 15 months.

A Major US Bank: This legacy application contained 3.3 million source lines of FORTRAN and 164,000 lines of DCL. TSRI delivered a Transformation Blueprint^TM and engineering support services to assess the port of the software from Alpha hardware and OpenVMS operating system to Intel Xeon series and Red Hat Linux.

Veterans Health Administration (VHA) VistA Health Care System: TSRI transformed the 2.2 million lines of MUMPS of OpenVista^® into Java and EGL (EGL is IBM's Enterprise Generation Language).  OpenVista^® is an open source version of the VistA, the VHA enterprise-wide Electronic Health Care Record system.

What is remarkable about these legacy modernization projects is all were accomplished by small delivery teams in months at sub-dollar per line of code cost with 100% automated code conversion.

What makes this possible is TSRI's industry leadership in applying AI to software modernization. This leadership predates the company's founding in 1995 and dates back to the early 1980s when TSRI's founder was a research scientist at the Boeing AI Center. During this time, he systematically transferred AI technologies from the U.S. Air Force's Knowledge Based Software Assistant program and the Carnegie Group and pioneered their use for avionics and industrial software optimisation, reverse-engineering, reengineering, quality assurance and testing.

Today, TSRI's robust JANUS Studio^® tool suite is the highly evolved derivative of nearly 30 years of continuous R&D in the application of AI to software modernization. Each modernization project TSRI undertakes adds more intelligence to JANUS Studio^® multi-language transformation framework. TSRI customers benefit from the highest levels of automation, code quality, economies of scale and schedule compression because JANUS Studio^® continuously assimilates new language models and rule libraries extensions for use on future projects. TSRI's AI heritage enables JANUS Studio^® to achieved levels of proficiency at software language translation that today vastly exceeds human performance, and is revolutionizing the way banking, insurance, healthcare, military, and government enterprises modernize their legacy IT infrastructures into high-quality modern object-oriented software systems.

TSRI takes seriously the development of community standards that facilitate interoperability between product and service offerings.  As a Platform Member of the Object Management Group (OMG), TSRI is a leading contributor to the Architecture Driven Modernization Task Force (ADM TF).  TSRI services and JANUS Studio^® adhere to, have helped define, and in some cases have served as leading exemplars for the OMG's emerging ADM TF standards.

Today, modern computers can understand and translate legacy software applications with levels of proficiency and accuracy that vastly exceed human performance.  This allows complex modernization projects to be completed in months rather than years for a tiny fraction of the cost of manual replacement projects.  The clear leader in this field is TSRI.  TSRI combines unprecedented automation with an agile, reliable, iterative, and customisable process that achieves high quality modernized object-oriented code at a fraction of the cost of all other alternatives.  While more than 70% of major IT projects fail, TSRI has a published track record of 100% success rate on more than 70 major modernization project successes.

Information Systems Transformation
Architecture-Driven Modernization Case Studies
By William M. Ulrich and Philip Newcomb
ISBN: 978-0-12-374913-0

About the book:

Architecture-Driven Modernization gives you everything you need to know to update costly obsolete systems, transform data, and save millions of dollars.

Philip Newcomb
Founder and CEO of TSRI

Mr. Newcomb is an internationally recognized expert in the application of AI and formal methods to software engineering.  After leaving Boeing he led a team of software engineers to develop the TSRI JANUS Studio^® toolset.  Mr. Newcomb is the author of numerous papers, books, and industry standards.