HP Helps Customers Modernize Their IT Applications

HP announced a suite of services designed to help customers modernize their legacy IT applications as they build more flexible and manageable application environments through web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

HP Application Modernization Services help customers manage the transition from costly and inflexible applications to an application environment that is aligned to business demands and able to respond to changing needs. This increased flexibility is crucial for companies considering developing an SOA.

With HP Application Modernization Services, customers can re-engineer an existing application, re-host an application to a highly reliable and manageable standards-based platform, replace custom-designed code with a packaged application and retire an application that no longer supports the business.

"Customers are looking to take a rational and pragmatic approach to modernizing legacy applications; one that maximizes business investment, minimizes business risks and delivers timely and measured results," said Carl Greiner, senior vice president, Infrastructure, Ovum, Inc.

A key component of HP's SOA roadmap, these new services are based on technologies and service offerings from HP and its solution provider partners. They include:
• Portfolio Rationalization Service: Determines where organizations ought to spend their resources and time regarding modernization efforts that will positively impact business and system issues.
• Modernization Workshop: Includes process overview, application review and targeting, review of business drivers and initial cost-and-benefit factors, and provides modernization options and substantiation for the development of a business case for modernization.
• Application Analysis Service: Includes rapid and thorough analysis of legacy applications characteristics, providing a baseline for improvement and a detailed application modernization plan that reduces total cost of ownership and improves business agility.
• Application Transition Service: Helps customers design and implement the strategies for modernization including re-engineering, re-hosting, replacing, retaining and retiring, as well as building, testing and maintaining the new application environment.
• Support, Monitor and Control Services: Applied to a customer's hardware, software and services, these services smoothly transition the customer to the new operational environment.
Key drivers for application modernization include porting and migrating applications to more cost-effective platforms, replacing legacy mainframe application functionality, and reengineering applications using model-driven and SOA approaches.

"Through the modernization process, customers can build an application environment that can start them on the road to becoming an Adaptive Enterprise," said Uday Kumaraswami, vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Applications Practice, HP Services.

HP expertise spans a spectrum of SOA products and services that helps customers scale, manage and deliver desired business flexibility through collaboration with customers and partners. In addition, HP has about 6,500 HP Services professionals available to implement an SOA.