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A software company has a portfolio of products in the retail market
segment.
The primary application was written in the 80's in COBOL language
and is responsible for a significant portion of their revenue. The Sales and
IT directors have been looking at revitalizing the product range with a view
to increasing the company revenues from sales of their products. The increase
in sales revenue could be generated through:
- New Clients- when faced with a range of competitor's options, such clients
would invariably opt for new technologies. The reason for this is not the
technology itself - but the proven advantages of the technology. A centrally
controlled browser-based or Client Server application is more saleable than
a DOS based one. " … Would any IT department standardize on a DOS
based word processing application when there are other choices? …"
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- Existing Client Base - Selling upgrades to existing clients is the cornerstone
of many software companies. A 'new technology' upgrade is as much a compelling
reason as additional features in an established product. When for example,
Microsoft introduced Windows or Windows NT (New Technology) - there was little
change in terms of an operating system: control over hardware, monitor, file
access, bios. The introduced changes were non-functional : ease of use, longer
filenames, stability, etc.
Other Issues:
- Reduction in deployment costs associated with new installations or upgrades
on individual PCs - using a browser based deployment.
- Where deployment has been primarily on mainframes, then the cost of ownership
can be substantially reduced by moving to smaller platforms - such as Sun
workstations.
- Other Benefits of Internets, Intranets and Extranets. Most companies are
already aware of these benefits. However, building such capabilities into
the existing product range is more of a challenge. In 1998 seeing the future
of the internet - Bill Gates ordered the product development team at Microsoft
to build internet features into the product ranges. For most other companies
the strategy is a valid one - although more difficult to administer/manage
(specially non-IT companies).
- General Product Development Issues: As with any software application, the
product can benefit from additional features, enhancement and functionality.
This becomes even more evident if various applications are successfully integrated
together - e.g. an Inventory Management (IM) application linked to a Sales
Order Processing (SOP). On their own, these applications may contain most
of the required features. But after the integration - new requirement would
soon creep in: 'Having the inventory data at hand, it would be good if the
SOP system could notify the IM system of the future / regular orders thus
enabling … '.
With the long term view that the application would eventually need to be upgraded
into a new language/architecture, any further investment in development within
current architecture/language may not be recoverable.
Recent Mergers and Acquisitions of two large Financial Organization has led
to a large degree of duplicity of their IT system. The duplicity spans across
all of the IT systems - front office, back-office, payroll and etc. The initial
rationalization of these systems requires detailed documentation - listing detail
functionality of each system -i.e. a description of what each system does, what
the business rules are and how the system interacts with other systems.
The next requirement is to remove the duplicity - and provide integration between
remaining systems. The requirements outlined in this Study could be present
in any type of company - from Manufacturing to Retail.
Software Mining's CORECT tool can provide detailed documentation from the
structure of the code thus enabling the comparison of the different systems.
Whist the comparison of functionality is a manual job - Software Mining can
help provide a better integration platform for the remaining systems via upgrading
them to the more current languages, industry standard 3rd party components (Oracle
Database, IBM or BEA Application Servers, Sun hardware, etc) .
A large insurance company has host of IT systems for Treaty Management, Claims
Administration, Policy Administration, Account Management, Underwriting, Financial
Management and Payment. This functionality is provided via a series of custom
made applications written on different platforms.
The main focus in integration is communication across different part of a
multi-platform system. However, provision of external channels to suppliers
and clients (EDI and Extranet) is also needed. All the new channels are expected
to re-use the existing internal components. Therefore all the components are
to standardize on use of XML as a means of communication, i.e. all system interfaces:
internal, external and EDI components to communicate with each other via a XML.
Software Mining's CORECT tool generates code that can meet the XML level integration
required here. The generated code utilizes a flexible architecture with such
requirements in mind. The famework layer may be adopted to work with XML messaging
without any need to change a single line of business code.
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