Posts tagged ‘Migration’

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April 24, 2013

Reduce cost and move to a standards based platform by migrating off your Oracle Tuxedo applications

by Roman Kharkovski

This article was written by Hariharan Venkitachalam (IBM).

In this article we want to illustrate the options and the benefits of moving off from the Oracle Tuxedo platform on to a IBM solution. Having talked to several customers we want to highlight and provide insights on the migration process. IBM provides different solutions catering to needs of the clients migrating from Oracle Tuxedo. In brief below are the available solutions:

  1. IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms and IBM Migration Assistant Tooling for Oracle Tuxedo – helps clients to reuse existing applications.
  2. IBM WebSphere eXtended Transaction Runtime and IBM Migration Assistant Tooling for Oracle Tuxedo – helps clients to modernize their existing COBOL / C / C++ applications and get new features in porting them to the new IBM platform.
  3. IBM Mixed Language Application Modernization Pattern – helps clients to deploy in a cloud ready environment such as IBM PureApplication System or through IBM Workload Deployer.

What values does the IBM solution bring to me? As said there are different solutions from IBM and so it would be best to talk the value add on the context of each solution:

IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms and IBM Migration Assistant Tooling for Oracle Tuxedo.

IBM TXSeries has been in the market for well over decade and is a mature product; having a wide spread deployment world-wide running across various industries like Banking, Healthcare, Insurance, Retail, Manufacturing, Transportation, and so on.

TXSeries adopts a robust framework of CICS – a famous OLTP platform in the industry. The simplicity of the CICS architecture provides various benefits to that of a Oracle Tuxedo. Firstly, it is proven that TXSeries consumes less CPU power and memory usage to that of Oracle Tuxedo for the same throughput (or a TPS factor). This means you can do more with less. In terms of large deployments, TXSeries scales across different hardware platforms, provides an intuitive work load management, flexibility in deploying applications and refreshing them later with an updated version without requiring to stop your business. Multiple instances of TXSeries systems running on different hardware can talk 2PC (global transaction), provides monitoring through Web based administration tool, Tivoli agents, Web Services SupportPac, WebSphere Business Events SupportPac, IMAT SupportPac…. and all this at no additional cost!

IBM WebSphere eXtended Transaction Runtime and IBM Migration Assistant Tooling for Oracle Tuxedo.

IBM WebSphere eXtended Transaction Runtime offers a first class integration between traditional applications written in C, C++, or COBOL and Java EE applications running on WebSphere environment. This is the best available solution in the market place today to modernize your existing Oracle Tuxedo applications and manage them on the WebSphere environment. The management, deployment and development processes for applications are all integrated with the features provided by IBM WebSphere eXtended Transaction Runtime technology, and couple this with the feature pack that provides the IBM Migration Assistant Tooling for Oracle Tuxedo that helps you to migrate off your existing Oracle Tuxedo applications.

This solution helps in standardizing your entire application environment including Oracle Tuxedo applications based on the WebSphere infrastructure with proven high availability, scalability, work load balancing, security contexts, etc. With this you do not have to maintain or buy additional components for managing Oracle Tuxedo applications compared to your Java EE applications.

IBM Mixed Language Application Modernization Pattern

IBM Mixed Language Application Modernization Pattern helps clients to deploy in a cloud ready environment such as IBM PureApplication System or through IBM Workload Deployer. This solution leverages the capability of the IBM WebSphere eXtended Transaction Runtime technology as described above. In addition this solution provides a cloud-ready solution to run your existing Oracle Tuxedo application on to a IBM Cloud platform. IBM Mixed Language Application Modernization Pattern is a virtual application pattern that allows you to run COBOL, C and C++ applications on a modern cloud ready environment.

Migration Assessment

The migration assessment starts with a discovery process. IBM has developed a migration questionnaire that we send to our clients in advance of a discovery call. The questionnaire enables us to get a basic understanding of the existing application environment so that we can ask more appropriate questions, dig deeper in to their application environment and estimate more accurately the potential problems and issues facing the migration on to a IBM technology.

One of the must to understand in terms of Oracle Tuxedo migration is the services used within their existing Oracle Tuxedo applications such as the ATMI API. This can be done either by scanning the source of the application code and looking for ATMI API or to make it even easier we provide a analyzer tool that generates a summary report on the usage of Tuxedo services within the application and if they would be supported with IBM solutions.

We then usually proceed for a proof of concept to migrate a subset of TUXEDO application to the target IBM solution. It helps to validate the target solution that is being offered and can offer further guidance on how the rest of the application migrations could be migrated.

Our initial focus is to retain the existing application in an as-is form as much as possible. However as we work through the migrations we further add value and benefits in terms of providing a better unified management environment for the applications, better tools, other non functional aspects such as scalability, high availability and a future-proof compatible applications that can be run on CICS Transaction Server for z/OS.

How does IBM Migration Assistant Tooling for Oracle Tuxedo (IMAT) can help?

IMAT tool provides you the necessary tools that lets you to migrate your existing Oracle Tuxedo based application on a IBM Solution seamlessly, without requiring considerable effort…During the migration process, your application remains as-is – this is a key benefit in the migration projects which are quite sensitive to any changes done in the application business logic. Also you might think that being new to a IBM environment, it would require a larger learning curve – but this is not the case with IMAT… it is equipped will all the tools required with which you continue to develop and deploy your application as you were doing in the Oracle Tuxedo environment! Isn’t this a great boon for such migration? Less learning and quick deployments of your existing applications! This is why we call IMAT an S.M.A.R.T migration offering. You can continue to maintain your existing applications and new application can be written to take advantage of the CICS Application Programming sets.

Does IMAT change my application code?

Not really. We have had proof of concepts where we have done the migration of applications without modifying a single line of code in the existing applications… Even the Makefile or the build scripts used to build the application remain unchanged except for the libraries that needs to be link-edited to the one provided by IMAT tool.

Bullet proof investment for the future

One unique advantage moving to an IBM solution is that your applications become compatible with the best quality of service platforms such as CICS Transaction Server for z/OS if you wish to scale over the roof… With the z Enterprise one can consolidate all the heterogeneous hardware in to one single box with the reliability that you can only get from IBM mainframe.

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February 25, 2013

The Oracle Forms Dilemma – part 1

by Eric Berg
A common challenge that organizations have is determining what they should do about legacy applications built on older technology platforms.  These apps often don’t fit well with their plans to implement a modern, scalable, and secure services-based infrastructure but the path to replacing those apps is not necessarily clear.  A prime example of this dilemma is addressing the considerable investments they have tied up in Oracle Forms applications. Oracle Forms has been around for a very long time, so organizations that have been using it for any period of time will probably have lots of Forms applications, most having outdated user interfaces with hard coded business logic that is not well understood.  Although the latest version of Oracle Forms (11g) has the ability to interact with elements of Fusion Middleware 11g, that interaction is very limited.Oracle considers Forms to be a “mature” technology so not much has actually changed with Forms or is likely to change any time soon.  Although Oracle has stated that Forms is not going away, Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is firmly established as their strategic platform for application development going forward, with no plans to provide a migration path for existing Forms customers.In this post I wanted to discuss some of the business drivers for replacing Forms applications as well as some considerations for identifying which Forms applications to replace or modernize. In a future post I’ll discuss some of the options you should be considering to support your modernization and replacement plans.Why you should replace your Oracle Forms applicationsThere are several obvious reasons for replacing Oracle Forms applications.First, customers who have been using Forms for a significant period of time probably have applications built by developers who left the organization and have left behind little or no documentation.  These apps are unlikely to be understood all that well by your current team of developers so time must be spent investigating the app whenever there is an issue or a new requirement to be implemented, increasing support, development, and testing costs.  Further, the Forms specific skill sets for maintaining these applications have over time become harder to find and retain – after all, who wants to work on 1980’s technology?  These factors all contribute to rising support costs that are adversely impacting total cost of ownership.A common complaint with Forms applications is that they are using old, outdated user interfaces, resulting in low user adoption and poor user satisfaction.  The workforce of today is used to modern web interfaces with usability paradigms that are inconsistent with the way these older Forms applications were designed to work.  Further, the Forms UI’s miss out on the move towards incorporating new capabilities such as social business features or supporting new channels like mobile, which most organizations realize is becoming an imperative.

Another pressing issue is that the business logic contained within these apps has been hard coded, which makes them difficult to update as market conditions change and processes are updated.  This can impact your organization’s business agility, leaving you exposed to competitor threats and potentially missing important market opportunities. Certainly there is a risk that users – both internal and external to your organization – are left dissatisfied when changes cannot be made or delivered on time.

So, our next question is “why shouldn’t I adopt Oracle ADF as a replacement for Forms?”  Certainly there are plenty of organizations that have gone that route.  ADF is a platform for developing applications that use several standards based technologies (e.g. Java skills, web development skills, etc.).  However, there are several reasons why you might not want to go down this path:

  • ADF is a heavyweight proprietary development framework, effectively locking you into the Oracle stack of software
  • ADF has a significant learning curve, so don’t expect that just because a your staff has some familiarity with Oracle’s SOA stack that picking up and running with ADF is a given – it will require some significant investments in skills development
  • Some have complained about the slow page performance of ADF applications due to the complex generated javascript and html
  • ADF uses its own javascript libraries, which are large and difficult to modify with no real option to use Eclipse, which many developers are more accustomed to using

So for many organizations it makes far more sense to consider standards based alternatives to ADF that make use of lightweight frameworks that provide more flexibility and choice.

Considerations for modernizing and replacing Forms applications

So assuming you have a wide range of Forms apps, your first task is to build an inventory of all Forms apps and then examine how these apps are maintained and what changes are actually required.  Some have probably been in use for years doing their job, with few new requirements and no significant usability issues, no need to support new channels like mobile, no new integrations needed, or any of the other typical drivers for application change.  These are obviously the cases where it makes the most sense to just leave the app alone. Start with the assumption that not all Forms apps will need to be replaced and stay focused on those apps where there is a solid business case to replace.

Your next set of Forms apps are those where usability might be an issue, but for the most part the app does its job and could use just a bit of modernizing.  Solutions such as exposing the app through a portal, treating them as back office apps that are called through a workflow, or wrapping the Forms app as a web service and calling on them to deliver a business function as needed are all reasonable ways to deal with this group of apps.  This type of modernizing is again going to be the hallmark of apps that are undergoing very little change so these approaches help avoid unnecessary migration costs and risks.

The key is to identify the apps in the inventory that have been costly to maintain, or cases where new requirements are being raised.  Look for cases where the business logic must be updated regularly, where the app needs to be delivered through new channels such as mobile, or cases where there the Forms app must be integrated with several other applications.

Once you’ve identified this group, focus on building the business case for moving the app to a new platform.  Unless you’ve got a clear and compelling business case it is unlikely you will ever see the funding for the replacement. There are a lot of different ways to go through the decision process to determine which apps to leave alone, which to modernize, and which to replace.  There will certainly be many borderline cases as well.  The key is to identify the costs associated with the apps – licensing, subscription & support, maintenance, development, testing, etc. as well as costs that may be harder to measure, such as productivity and usability. Ask the business users of these apps about their pain points and the opportunity costs of continuing to use these applications.  Pulling together this focused inventory of Forms apps along with the hard and soft costs will go a long ways towards moving down the path to replacement.

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February 6, 2013

SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark – IBM beats Oracle on performance and cost

by Roman Kharkovski

It has been quite some time since I wrote about the SPECj battles between IBM and Oracle. Today I would like to discuss the rare case of an “apples to apples” comparison between IBM and Oracle on almost identical hardware. It is not often that we get to see results published by different vendors on the identical processor types on servers with very similar configurations. Such rare comparison point became possible thanks to IBM publishing a result in late 2012.

Read full article here: SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark – IBM beats Oracle on performance and cost.

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January 8, 2013

Why Canadian D+H has moved from Oracle Fusion Middleware to IBM?

by Roman Kharkovski

“So, while it took us a year to do the development on Oracle Fusion, we were up and running both development and a production service on the DataPower appliance within four months, shockingly fast.” – Paul Lewis, Vice President of Technology, Architecture and Security, D+H.

Davis + Henderson Corporation (D+H) has been a trusted partner to the financial services industry for over 130 years. Today, D+H offers a broad range of technology and technology-based solutions to financial institutions across North America, including commercial and mortgage lending technology, student lending services, collateral registration and recovery services, and payments solutions. Headquartered in Toronto, D+H employs approximately 4,500 people.

In 2010 and 2011 D+H was trying to build a new SOA platform using Oracle Fusion Middleware and Sun GlassFish, but it proved to be exceedingly difficult and after performing several POCs, D+H decided to switch to IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM DataPower appliances and the IBM DB2 database.

In addition to reducing their costs, D+H has seen 20 to 40 percent performance increases and can now deploy new workloads in hours versus the five days required in the past.

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Read complete case study:

“D+H consolidates its IT environment for improved growth and efficiency”.

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December 6, 2012

Choosing WebSphere over Oracle based on real world experiences

by Roman Kharkovski

To quote wikipedia: “The principle of minimum total potential energy is a fundamental concept used in physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. It asserts that a structure or body shall deform or displace to a position that minimizes the total potential energy, with the lost potential energy being dissipated as heat”.

I think the same applies in business, except not for energy, but for the cost of the system. Any IT System these days seems to be trying to achieve the lowest cost. Unlike physics, IT System does not do it by itself and there is no law that forces it to do it, but it is common sense and business acumen of those who run those system that makes them consider ways to reduce costs. If costs can’t be reduced, it is rare that IT Systems change.

Considering the high cost of switching from one platform to another it is always educating to see examples of those companies who perform a large scale re-platforming effort. And perform it successfully. It is critical for IT decision-makers to choose the right enterprise middleware platform for their organization. Middleware plays a strategic role in everything from the time-to-benefit for new IT services to the efficiency with which optimal performance can be maintained for existing ones. IT decision-makers therefore have to factor all kinds of attributes into their middleware choices—including technical features, ease of use, infrastructure resource utilization and licensing costs.

In this webinar, industry analyst Andrew Bisson of the Branham Group will share the results of his recent in-depth study of middleware users. His insights will help you leverage their hard-won real-world experiences so you make a smarter middleware decision.

Webcast Title: IBM WebSphere vs. Oracle Fusion: Lessons from the Real World
Webcast Date: December 7, 2012
Webcast Time: 1:00 PM EST (10:00 AM PST)

REGISTRATION PAGE URL

Speakers:

Andrew Bisson, Vice President, Consulting Services, Branham Group Inc.
Roman Kharkovski, IBM, Executive IT Specialist

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October 8, 2012

Webcast – 13 reasons to migrate from Oracle WebLogic to IBM WebSphere

by Roman Kharkovski

This webcast was recorded on November 7, 2012.

Back in June I hosted a webcast titled “Save money with IBM WebSphere over Oracle WebLogic”. Since that time, IBM has published  new SPECjEnterprise2010 world-record EjOPS/core result, shipped new version of WAS 8.5, shipped production version of the IBM PureApplication System, shipped new version of WebSphere eXtreme Scale and most importantly, migrated a whole bunch of customers from WebLogic to WebSphere. As a matter of fact, back in July, Branham Group published a new white paper describing experience of several companies that moved from Oracle middleware to IBM.

Given all these recent events, I decided to refresh the webcast that was done back in June. The topics I will cover in the webcast  include product mapping of IBM and Oracle, pricing and licensing for virtualized and native environments, product packaging, Gartner report on middleware market share comparison of IBM and Oracle, customer examples of migrations from WebLogic to WebSphere, IBM migration toolkit, new WAS v8.5 capabilities and technical advantages over WebLogic Server 12c, performance comparison of WAS and WLS, including SPECjEnterprise2010 results.

You are invited to join me and learn about 13 reasons why so many companies are migrating from WebLogic Server to WebSphere Application server. Here is the webcast registration link.

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September 17, 2012

Forrester Research discusses its new TEI study on the benefits of moving from Open Source to WebSphere (webcast replay)

by Roman Kharkovski

Back in July I wrote about the new Forrester white paper on the benefits of migrating from Open Source application server to WebSphere. Now you can listen to the Forrester webcast on the same subject on September 28th. In this webcast you can learn details from a new independent report that shows the total economic impact of migrating from an open source solution to IBM WebSphere Application Server — including a 44% ROI producing a net value of over $1 million. The featured speakers in this webcast will be:

 

John R. Rymer
Forrester, Vice President, Principal Analyst

 

 

Jon Erickson
Forrester, Principal consultant for Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) practice

 

 

Mark 12pm EST, Sept 28 on your calendar and dial into the Forrester webcast: The Benefits of Moving from Open Source to WebSphere Application Server Forrester Research Discusses its New Total Economic Impact Study.

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July 26, 2012

Forrester paper on the ROI of migrating from Open Source to IBM WebSphere Application Server

by Roman Kharkovski

Forrester Research has published a new paper titled “The Total Economic Impact To IBM WebSphere Application Server Migrating From An Open Source Environment. This paper is based on the interviews with a federal agency in US who migrated their existing development, test, and production environment away from open source application server to WebSphere Application Server. Based on the interviews, Forrester has completed financial analysis and found that a representative organization based in part on the agency interviewed experienced the risk-adjusted ROI of 51% with the payback period within 24 months.

Read full article here: Forrester paper on the ROI of migrating from Open Source to IBM WebSphere Application Server.

PS. Back in 2010 Forrester interviewed commercial Fortune 100 company and published this paper: “Forrester Total Economic Impact study for WAS vs Open Source.” This was a particularly interesting customer since they had a very large and important application that was not working well on the Open Source application server and was saved my moving it to WAS.

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July 18, 2012

Branham Group study of customers who chose WebSphere over Oracle Fusion

by Roman Kharkovski

Branham Group has published results of their study of companies who evaluated side by side and in some cases moved their existing workloads from Oracle Fusion middleware to IBM WebSphere.The paper describes what was learned about, the reasons these organizations chose IBM, their overall real-world experiences to-date at this stage in their development and deployment cycle, and the correlation between their expectations and their actual experiences based on their selection criteria. The study features four organizations:

  • TBC Corporation, a multinational wholesaler and retailer of aftermarket automotive parts and services;
  • Huntington Bank, a large regional full-service consumer and commercial bank;
  • Bauer Media Group, a multinational magazine publishing company; and
  • a large logistics information service provider that has chosen to remain anonymous.

Each of these organizations has shared their ‘lessons learned’ for the benefit of other peer organizations and executives facing similar important IT decisions. The report provides company-specific findings from the individual case studies followed by an integrated discussion of benefits and TCO insights in the context of these real-world examples.

Download this free report directly from the IBM website.

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June 29, 2012

IBM Safe Passage: A Migration Plan for Progress Customers

by Roman Kharkovski

Progress Software recently announced that they are divesting from a number of their products, including Savvion BPM, SonicMQ, Sonic ESB, Fusesource BPM and messaging middleware. But no worries! IBM is to the rescue with its new “Safe Passage Program” where we help you craft a phased implementation migration strategy from those soon to be dead products to IBM middleware.

To learn more, join this webcast with John Donaldson, IBM World Wide Competitive Sales Leader: “Competitive Migrations for IBM Safe Passage: A Migration Plan for Progress Customers”.

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