SOA legacy application transformation

Fundamentally SOA is about integration of your existing IT systems. But in order to re-use them in new flexible business processes, their functionality needs to be exposed as a set of cross-functional services. This means that a vast majority of existing systems require sort of transformational effort that would overcome the existing technological limitations, data model inconsistencies, and inability to support required performance/availability SLA.

This process has many similarities with Legacy System Rejuvenation Service. Exigen Services engineers conduct the assessment phase, perform reverse engineering of a monolithic application into business functions, examine the code base, downtime statistics and the support log. Based on the accumulated information they produce a cost benefit analysis for the application transformation and complete re-implementation options.

In the context of SOA application transformation several important aspects need serious attention. One of them is establishing a proper test environment, because in most cases our customers have only one environment with the legacy application operating in the production mode. This is due to the complexity of the systems’ interdependencies or the size of the legacy application itself. Our goal is either to replicate the production environment completely or emulate the systems that cannot be instantiated.

In the real world, each legacy application has its own notion of authentication, authorization, and other security-related concepts. Harmonizing them can be a very challenging task, involving identity transfer techniques based on SAML, Kerberos, or other proprietary mechanisms. Our application security practice ensures that the implemented schema is robust and reliable.

Last but not least are performance requirements. The Exigen Services performance engineering approach reveals bottlenecks within the target application that prevents meeting SLA. Depending on the technology, our engineers refactor identified modules, improving their overall performance and scalability making them cluster- or cloud- friendly.

During its 17 years history, Exigen Services has obtained deep expertise in a large number of technologies and platforms such as x86, Sparc, mainframes (IBM, HP, Fujitsu Siemens). We’ve completed hundreds of enterprise application integration projects that enable our customers to access their valuable data and business services more efficiently.