Legacy worth keeping. (IT News).

IBM Global Services (IGS) have announced two services-based offerings to help organisations transform their legacy systems. Application Portfolio Management (APM), and Legacy Transformation Services (LTS) are intended to unlock the business value tied up in legacy systems. The theory is that the existing investment in those systems can yield further returns, and the legacy technology framework is prevented from acting as an inhibitor of organisational change.

Legacy systems are often seen as the unwanted relatives of the IT world, unwieldy characters that are costly to have around, limit freedom of movement, and are swathed in such layers of historical complexity that are obsolete and poorly understood. However, all but the newest organisations have such things to contend with, often in areas critical to business continuity. The pace of technology's change has seen many a new investment quickly transition into legacy obscurity. Such negative comment about legacy systems is only one side of the story the truth is that much business expertise is embedded in them, on such a scale that re-inventing detailed parts would often he too expensive to consider, especially in today's straitened business environment. The trick to he mastered is to take the right parts of legacy systems out of older technology stacks, and to re-wrap it in ways that make it useable in newer systems.

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