Factor skills into legacy migrations, urge vendors

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Vendors looking to get organisations to move away or re-use legacy applications have stressed the importance of factoring the affect of a lack of specialist programming skills into any IT strategy.

When many organisations are characterised by having a mixed IT environment made up of legacy, mainframe and modern platform applications, independent IT consultancy Northdoor has today issued an alert to organisations with a strategy of maintaining and developing legacy IT applications.

It is advising organisations seeking people skilled in Gupta/Centura,

Oracle Forms, Visual Basic 6, RPG, Delphi or PowerBuilder to instead consider application modernisation and transformation using third party tools and consultancy, which it said can save as much as 20 per cent of the cost of in-house manual re-development.

"A large number of organisations with legacy applications are finding it difficult to recruit the skills they require to continue maintenance and development," said David Ballard, Northdoor consultancy director.

Michael Bennett, director at recruitment firm Rethink agreed: "I can't remember the last time we had a request for Delphi or PowerBuilder skills."

But he added: "The decision to keep or modernise legacy applications depends on the individual company's investment in the application. They should, however, also consider that they may not be able to attract or keep skilled IT staff if they are not able to use the most attractive skill sets."

The option to develop legacy applications written in COBOL is a speciality of vendor, Micro Focus. Andy Sinclair, Micro Focus senior product management director told IT PRO that Northdoor was broadly right to put out it's alert.

But, echoing the advice of Rethink's Bennett, Sinclair said organisations should not simply move over to commodity platforms just because the skill sets required are more readily available. In August, it has joined forces with the e-skills UK Employer Strategy Forum (ESF) for the Information Technology Management in Business (ITMB) degree course to help address growing demand for COBOL-skilled business IT professionals.

Sinclair said: "We wouldn't suggest re-writing a COBOL application. But companies can, instead, look to train [Microsoft] .NET and Java programmers in COBOL to make sure those legacy back-office applications that provide a differentiator can continue to add value to the business cost effectively."

Legacy applications can then subsequently be maintained and further developed using modern languages of better skill availability; languages such as .NET or Java/J2EE which then also present the opportunity to take advantage of web-services and a service oriented architecture.

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