If you are considering Application Modernization, Application Decommissioning or Application Overhaul, I would suggest a key reference. Application Portfolio Triage: TIME for APM (author: Jim Duggan from Gartner). Jim suggests a very elegant model, called TIME, which suggests a four-way categorization based on current and future business value of each application and the cost and risk of replacing it. This categorization can then become the framework for a strategic approach to application portfolio management.

TIME implicitly helps to explain why a few mainframe applications (like an online trading system in a stock exchange running on a proprietary fault-tolerant system) have survived so long. They are complex and mission critical and the cost and risk of replacing them had, till now, far outweighed the advantages associated with modern software and hardware. What’s happening now, however, is that the risk of continuing with them has sharply gone up. Most of the current crop of staff in an IT Department were not even born when some of the legacy platforms came on the de-support list by the respective vendors!

I am currently seeing a TIME model at work, which makes it even more fascinating. One of our customers has just gone through the 1st stage of “Tolerate” with an old version of an ERP running on a very old version of a RDBMS as they selected a new ERP for the enterprise. But the rollout took longer than expected while the performance of the older ERP was sharply deteriorating but needed to be retained for a couple more years. So the customer moved to the 2nd stage of “Invest” with a Database Archiving solution to keep the older ERP chugging for a few more years. They are currently in the 3rd stage of “Migrate” when all their business process across the globe would be migrated to the newer ERP. Once this is completed, we will see the final act of “Eliminate” (or Retirement) of the old ERP with some of the legacy data from it moved to the new ERP, some taken to the Datawarehouse, and most to a long term archive – and some very old or unimportant data completely purged.

Application Retirement makes a very good business case for reducing a Data Center’s operating costs. Why spend good money maintaining legacy applications that are no longer delivering any business value and there is little risk in eliminating them? Application Retirement technologies like Solix EDMS Application Retirement or the Solix ExAPPS Application Retirement Appliance are built to reduce risks of application retirement while at the same time delivering a very high ROI.

While Toyota is a much maligned name today, it taught the world Lean Manufacturing drawing on the concept of eliminating waste (“muda” in Japanese).  That spawned an entire discipline of “Lean” in Operations, epitomized by Lean Six Sigma. Now Green IT pundits are espousing a Leaner Data Center through Application Retirement. There is indeed a significant muda in a Data Center: estimates have shown anywhere between 70 – 80% of available resources (time, people, equipment, and software) are in a near idle state for over 50% of the time. Much of the lean in a Data Center had, till now, focused on Virtualization and Consolidation.  Now a new branch is evolving – and it is evolving rapidly – Rationalization, a major subset of which is Application Retirement.

Come to think of it – this mirrors the stages of lean manufacturing. The first stage was Just in Time – optimizing physical inventory across the supply chain. This is akin to Virtualization that optimizes servers and storage across multiple applications they are hosting to eliminate the muda capacity at any point of time. The second stage was Reducing Set-Ups – enabling smoother set-ups and more flexible operations. This may be compared with Consolidation of servers, storage and Data Centers that reduces muda (in terms of time, people productivity and resources) when, say, a new upgrade happens in the ERP version. The US Federal Government, for example, is embarking on the most ambitious Consolidation project ever undertaken. The other – and perhaps most important element of Lean Manufacturing was Cellular Manufacturing that rationalized manufacturing processes to reduce the number of SKUs even while increasing the number of car models. Rationalization in a Data Center aims to reduce the muda of servers, storage, applications and unnecessary processes – and maybe undertaken independent of consolidation – while at the same time the CIO is delivering more value-oriented systems to the businesses.

There are many sub-disciplines within Data Center Rationalization. The one that has caught the most attention is Application Retirement. As the name suggests, it is to cut the muda out of the no-longer-required applications but retain and manage historical data and provide access to it when (and if) required for audit, compliance or litigation support reasons. It is a category within Application Portfolio Management (APM) and is going by different names: Application Decommissioning, Application Sunsetting and Application Optimization. Mirroring them in APM – to deliver the CIO’s mantra of “more” – are Application Modernization, Application Renewal and Legacy Modernization.

The history of lean manufacturing has shown that fullest extent of process improvements comes only after implementing Cellular Manufacturing and not just JIT. The history of lean Data Centers actually started with Consolidation. The movement to Global Single Instances began over a decade ago. The last five years has seen the rapid adoption of Virtualization. We expect to see Application Retirement taking centre stage over the next decade. And believe me, there’s a lot of muda out there in the application portfolio of any enterprise – sometimes running to thousands!

Here’s a tale of two Application Retirements

The first was a pharmaceutical company that was recently acquired by a global major and had to retire its ERP and move over some of the more current data to the acquirer’s corporate ERP, some to the corporate Datawarehouse, and rest – the most historical and scarcely accessed data – archived to a secure repository for meeting long term statutory compliance or be accessed for audits or e-Discovery purpose.

The second was another global major that had lots (over a few hundred) departmental applications running in its different Divisions and subsidiaries around the world. A couple of years back it standardized on SAP. To reduce IT infrastructure costs it decided to decommission old hardware and all its legacy applications. The challenge was to maintain application context to all this data coming from many different applications running on mainframes, proprietary platforms and even Unix-based systems.

These are two ends of the spectrum on Application Retirement. While the basic problem is the same – preserving application context to the legacy data and making it available for reporting/query purposes long after the hardware and the application has been removed from the premises – there’s a clear difference between the two. The first is a RDBMS-based fairly modern ISV developed ERP running on a distributed system. The second is more complex – with many (and multiple) non-relational bespoke and packaged systems running on multiple proprietary systems and mainframes. However, the approach till today had been the same for both – one of throwing a lot of consulting effort even if an archiving solution tailored for application retirement was being used.

At Solix, we wondered if we could take a different approach and make the Application Retirement process for the first category simpler, make it faster and make it cheaper. We took the analogy of municipality planning. Modernizing the existing downtown in Sunnyvale, California that has lots of small houses and a few large bungalows but has no high rises must necessarily be different if one has to do the same in a city like Chicago.

Birth of an Appliance

Given our goals of (1) Making it Simpler, (2) Making it Faster, (3) Getting a Quicker ROI, and (4) Reducing the Total Cost of Ownership, we looked at different options. The challenge was to automate the entire process once the candidate(s) for application retirement had been identified: from data classification, data migration, building application context, data de-duplication & compression to enabling querying and reporting. It was a business problem that our Engineering had to solve. That’s the hallmark of Innovation in today’s world. We are proud to announce Industry’s First Application Retirement Appliance.

Solix ExAPPS: Industry’s First Application Retirement Appliance

Solix ExAPPS provides a complete hardware and software combination for Application Retirement and data preservation plug-and-play solution. Customers can plug Solix ExAPPS into a network port and power it up to have industry’s first and only pre-configured Application Retirement solution. This is how it stacks up:

All that a customer has to do is point Solix ExAPPS at the first candidate for application retirement using a Web browser. After that Solix ExAPPS will migrate all the application data including transactional business objects and reports, add application context to the legacy data, provide de-duplication, compression, and store in an immutable form in Solix ExAPPS. Once that is done, business users or IT can query and report on the legacy data using standard reporting tools that are used in enterprises. To meet compliance requirements, Solix ExAPPS would make the legacy data immutable to guarantee that the data cannot be modified. This process would then be repeated for the next application candidate. You can do this for packaged or custom applications running on any RDBMS on Windows, Linux or Unix system. It cannot get simpler than that.