Unlocking the Mainframe: Modernizing Legacy Systems to a Service-Oriented Architecture

In recent years, the much-reported "democratization of IT"—as delivered by the PC platform and other midtier environments—has led to a plethora of choices for users; however, the mainframe has suffered as a result. With a dwindling ecosystem and a host of siloed applications, mainframe environments are becoming an increasing source of concern to organizations worried that one day the business logic trapped within them will be inaccessible to the enterprise at large. With the average Fortune 100 company maintaining approximately 35 million lines of legacy code, you can see what a sizable problem this presents.
Enter service-oriented architecture (SOA). Functioning as both a software development environment and a delivery framework, SOA provides a mechanism for defining business services and operating models—and in so doing provides a technological infrastructure that IT organizations can use to provide the agility and adaptability they need to meet enterprise business requirements and to modernize their legacy environments.