Application Modernization in Action

A lot has been said about modernization – particularly in the last 10 to 12 years. If you look at what global engineering teams have accomplished and what many of Prakat’s engineers have focused on, it’s no wonder why. Modernizing existing applications is a must for practically every business. Let’s take a look at the importance of application modernization, including an example of our experience with it.

New vs. Legacy Applications

Like so many legacy solutions in the market, software automation came into segments like real estate, banks, and retail long ago. But, technology has changed rapidly. For any large organization, it's not easy to just shift and move to newer technology, mostly because large amounts of time and money have already been spent on existing technology. Therefore, modernization can be a quicker and less expensive option.

Legacy transformation and application modernization must be thought through and put in place where there is a true need. Oftentimes, modernization comes into the picture not because the existing solution is bad, but simply because there have been so many generations of technologies that have changed over time.?

For example, in today's world, you may not find a COBOL programmer to facilitate the modernization of existing technology – it's not easy. As a result, companies may be forced or compelled to switch to newer technologies. Modernization often happens simply because newer technologies have features that previously did not exist.

Prakat’s Modernization Journey

For us, a large part of Prakat’s modernization journey has been in the test engineering world, where we helped in the modernization of tools and frameworks, or in the retail and real estate segments to move from COBOL to PL SQL. These are some of the real-life examples we’ve done very effectively. We take simple transformation needs, help our customers reach their goals, and bring in larger teams to build and support total transformation whenever necessary.

Meeting Client Needs

One project that is close to my heart included helping a client where a lot of existing scripts were written in COBOL. Because the application was so old, there was no document to fully understand each function or how it worked. So, we needed COBOL experts to come and look at the code. But, our job was not limited to simply changing the COBOL scripts to PL SQL scripts: our job was also to document each of the features along the way because there was no existing documentation. With this transformation, we made it easy for the new-generation engineering teams – who eventually joined our customer’s team – to be able to interpret the application features.?

Interestingly, most of these scripts integrated with several other internal and external applications, ultimately modernizing the application. Additionally, even though we found a small number of defects, we could not fix them all, because if we did, it would also affect several downstream applications. So, ultimately, we had to retain these specific defects when we did the transformation. We made sure to call out these defects to the core engineering team, which they took up later as part of their re-architect of the entire solution. On our end, it was a little funny to see these defects and not be able to completely fix them, but we were still able to modernize the application.

In this particular case, we delivered a very important and powerful value to our customer, documenting how the application worked, whereas before, the new-generation engineering teams didn't fully understand the process and how it worked.

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