Future-Proof Your CA 2E Applications
Denise P. Kalm
Are many of your critical business applications based on CA 2E? If so, has your business begun demanding upgrades and enhancements that you can’t readily respond to because of limitations in the platform? Do you need to rehost your applications? For many, CA 2E isn’t keeping up with the capabilities you need to provide your business with capabilities like web, mobile, cloud and more. And though you might not be aware, aging code is often slowed down by ‘technical debt,’ which means coding choices, errors and inefficiencies introduced over time.
But what’s the answer? You already know that there isn’t the time or money to rewrite all these applications. And you wouldn’t want to take the risk given the code complexity. Most companies also can’t simply buy software applications to replace the older versions. Rarely does the market supply exactly what you need, complete with the tailoring and features you’ve introduced over the years to give your company a competitive edge.
The answer is a better application development platform; one that won’t introduce risk or take developers ages to learn. CA Plex is that platform. It offers the capabilities of an Architected Rapid Application Design Platform (ARAD). And, the interface is close enough to CA 2E to make it a viable option.
That is part of the answer. You can readily acquire this product. But then, how do you port your applications to it? CM First has a solution. We have created a way to ‘future-proofs’ your CA 2E applications with an automated migration methodology designed to help your company move to an Architected Rapid Application Design platform (ARAD). This approach, Model-Based Modernization Methodology or M3, retains all of the business logic and model design, yet moves these applications to a platform that can support modern technologies such as Cloud, Big Data, mobile and web. No longer will you be held back by the limitations of your framework. You also have the opportunity to move your applications to other hardware platforms using this approach. Many companies find this an essential part of modernization.
We will customize this solution for you, because we understand that each customer’s needs are different. CM First offers software, services and custom coding solutions, so we can ensure your applications can keep up with business objectives.
There are five steps to this process:
- Portfolio Assessment – what do you have and what platforms does it run on?
- Understand Business and Technical Drivers – what are your goals? Why would you consider this?
- Evaluate Approaches – what’s the best way to accomplish your goals?
- Execute Strategy
- Implement Supportive Technologies That Assist Future Growth
Services and consultation is part of the package, but there are also products that can help make this work. The first of these is CM Meta Analytics, a product designed to automate source code scanning and analysis, resulting in a database itemizing code issues, errors and possible security exposures. CM Meta Analytics is designed to automatically scan a wide variety of language domains, ranging from object-oriented Java to procedural COBOL, JCL, and ASM across a variety of platforms. Automation makes it possible to process millions of lines of code quickly. CM Meta Analytics’ output can be interfaced with external enterprise metadata analysis tools, such as CA Repository, increasing the value of these tools to the enterprise.
CM WebClient is an exciting addition to the CM First family of products. It enables developers to transform existing applications into web or mobile apps without requiring an expert understanding of either the enabling code technologies (HTML5, CSS, etc.) or having to understand the variances among device types and device operating systems. Be positioned to interface with your customers on the devices they prefer and the platforms they favor.
A frequent customer requirement is migrating to a new platform. One company determined a need to migrate their code because they could no longer find developers who had the experience to support CA 2E applications or manage System i. A more modern platform and application development environment would make it easier to find the support personnel and would more likely be able to handle future business requirements.
After seeing CM First’s M3 offering, the company migrated the code to Linux and CA Plex, adding CM WebClient for web development. The results met their goals. In addition to the successful rehosting, this company found they were able to display more information on one screen, which led to better ergonomics for users. The application itself also performed better because the entire application was executed on one server instead of having to hop from one platform to another.
Talk to us if you:
- Have performance or availability problems
- Have unexplained security issues
- Want to enhance applications that currently are essentially unmaintainable
- Desire to reduce infrastructure costs
- Wish to move to a more modern application framework
- Need to rewrite your applications in more modern (supportable) languages
- Desire to move your applications to a smaller set of standardized platforms
- Seek to extend capabilities to the web or mobile platforms
- Want to move to hybrid or public Cloud environments
CM First will help you modernize your CA 2E applications by providing an automated solution which will rapidly analyze and transform existing code, preserving your intellectual property. You can get there from here. Just call us.
Management team is simply never aware of the true scale of the problem. This problem, hidden from sight, is getting bigger every year and more difficult to deal with every year.” Andy Kyte, vice president and Gartner fellow.
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