Legacy Powers Legendary

January 15, 2020

Part 1 of 2

“Rocket Software is on a mission to empower our customers to transform from Legacy to Legendary” –Andy Youniss, Rocket Software CEO

At a 2019 town hall, it was intriguing to hear the above bold quote from our CEO, just because the words “legacy” and “legendary” are rarely used in the same statement.

For many years, the word legacy became synonymous with “old, dead and must be replaced”, which is a far cry from reality. As time went by, many environments realized that legacy does not exactly mean what’s implied, and rather is totally opposite. They realized that their legacy applications are investments with countless man-hours and business knowledge that went into them over many years.

Despite “the death of mainframe” being predicted for some time, it continues to be the bedrock of the world’s economy 52 years after its creation. Mainframe still accounts for 90% of Fortune 500’s core systems, and the functionality of thousands of banks, insurers, and manufacturers is built on hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL code. Just ask the banking industry and financial institutions and countless large corporations if they are willing to get rid of their mainframe systems. The same also applies to the MultiValue application platforms; MultiValue is and has been driving hundreds of thousands of businesses for decades.

Any software platform, whether legacy or brand new, must be able to evolve. Many legacy environments have chosen to evolve while others decided to adopt the status quo and remain stagnant, contributing to most of their issues. Other environments decided to solve the problem differently by chasing technology and buzzwords instead of chasing the solution that works for them, and that also didn’t end up so well in many cases.

Among all this noise, sometimes people lose sight of the most important fact — these applications are investments. It is what has been driving the business for decades, in most cases. Yes, it is legacy and there is nothing wrong with that; however, these applications also need to evolve, otherwise the application will age and become frail. Companies like Rocket Software and IBM have been working diligently to provide tools and products that help transform and evolve these environments so they can benefit from a breath of fresh air.

That’s what Rocket Software is all about. We understand the investment our customers have made and will help our customers to evolve from Legacy to Legendary. In my next post I’ll pose some questions and give you some housekeeping suggestions for keeping your MultiValue application modern.