Legacy applications can range from applications that are decades old, written in languages such as COBOL and PL/1, to more modern applications written in C, C++ or Java. Through years of changes these applications have become difficult or impossible to maintain and are poorly documented, leaving organizations with a lack of clear understanding of what the business logic actually does. There are many issues driving organizations to seek a solution to this problem:

•Agility - The need to change their application quickly to support critical changes in their business

•Cost - In addition to high software maintenance costs are the high costs to maintain legacy IT infrastructure, such as mainframe computers

•Compliance - The need to prove that software and systems are delivering business results compliant with internal and external regulations such as Basel II and Sarbanes Oxley

•Corticon's Legacy Application Modernization solution is a repeatable, tools-driven process that provides immediate transparency into any legacy code. The solution includes:

•Characterization - Capable of working with more than 100 languages, Characterization analyzes the application as it exists today.

•Knowledge Mining and Modeling - Reverse-engineers the legacy code to generate a detailed view of the application, including process maps, flowcharts, data models and embedded business rules. The next step is the transformation of the application data model and business rules into Corticon business rules models which can be easily understood, tested and executed.

•Modernization - Represents a range of uses of the rules models from helping development staff better maintain existing code, to utilizing the fully executable models in redeveloped SOA based applications.

The transparency of the business logic and application's structure allows not only greater insight and understanding into the legacy code, but also drives the modernization decision process to other more cost-effective, maintainable languages and platforms. Part of the Corticon mining process is the automatic conversion of existing business rules into Corticon business rule models which can subsequently be used in any modern service oriented architecture. The result is increased transparency, maintainability and faster ROI, serving as the foundation for the modernization of enterprise applications.

"There are an estimated 14,000 mainframes; and that number increases exponentially when factor in mini and micro computers," said David Straus, Senior Vice President, Corticon". "Those computers house tens of thousands of applications written in Cobol, PL/1, C and even Java that is poorly documented and has been maintained by different people over the past 10 to 20 years and, for the most part, with little continuity in the knowledge transfer process. Corticon's Legacy Modernization provides a low-cost, reliable way to understand what is actually happening in those legacy applications. That alone is a tremendous business value proposition. But customers derive the greatest value from their ability to use Corticon's executable business rules models directly in their production applications and call their new business rules models from their legacy applications or newer SOA based applications as standards based services.

With its strategic partner Trinity Millennium Group www.tringroup.com, Corticon offers IT departments a modernization path from complete analysis to the transformation of their legacy code exposed as agile business rules.

1 Legacy Application Modernization Software Architecture Essentials, by Phil Murphy, Forrester Research, Inc., April 13, 2007