Expanding Your Heritage Via Service Oriented Architecture And Data Warehousing

By Author: Roland Hughes
Total Articles: 3
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Company owners and heads of Fortune 500 corporations have been inundated with pitches to slash their IT labor costs by off-shoring.

Company owners and heads of Fortune 500 corporations have been inundated with pitches to slash their IT labor costs by off-shoring. They are also receiving a large number of marketing pitches to “modernize” their Legacy Systems. Use of the term Legacy System is a derogatory remark almost on par with a racial slur. It is designed to subconsciously create a dislike for the system which has turned profits for the company for decades. Marketing types need to create this dislike because the cheap skills, like Java and Windows, provide the largest low cost labor pools in third world countries. When companies try to off-shore skills like OpenVMS, COBOL, and FORTRAN, the profit margin evaporates due to limited availability.

Shrewd management understands their existing system really is their Heritage System. Within it are contained all of the business rules from all of the generations of management which came before them. It is to be nurtured, cared for, and expanded. The two primary ...
... methods of expansion are Service Oriented Architecture and Data Warehousing.

Most everyone working in IT has heard the sales pitch “You're a global company now. You're Legacy System cannot be modified to handle all of the currencies for all of the countries you wish to be doing business in over the next five years.” Some fall for this pitch. They purchase the shiny new software product they have seen so many white papers about only to find that their existing business, the one which always did well, suddenly isn't doing so well. A shining example of this would be the London Stock Exchange's switch to a Windows based trading system developed by an off-shore team. The new system caused the largest outage in the history of the exchange and one notable high profile exit from the management team.

When users complain about the speed of a system or its physical storage capacity, this can always be solved with time and money. Every so many months one of two things doubles, processor speed, or the number of processors which make up the computer. The original IBM PC had an 8088 processor running 4.77Mhz. Today, you can purchase a low end laptop computer for under $400 which has more processing capability and storage than a 1970s IBM Main Frame which cost in the neighborhood of a million dollars. The only way you could get 1Gig of storage for that Main Frame was to have a basement full of magnetic tapes and operators mounting them in tape drives 24 hours per day. Many desktop computers sold today have at least a quad core CPU in them. Four individual CPUs in one chip all working together. Mid-range and Main Frame computers typically have anywhere from 8 to 64 cores with some going as high as 128. What you lack in processor speed today you can gain in a few months if you are willing to spend the money.

The second major failure of computer system speed is Generic Compilation. Linux systems are notorious for this failure, but so is nearly every major corporation. In particular, most Linux 32-bit distributions get compiled so that even the poorest excuse for an 80386 clone can run the operating system. Users then compound this problem by running a 32-bit distribution compiled for a single CPU 80386 on their quad core computer and wonder why it isn't faster.

Big businesses have a similar problem. Some of the executables running on those computers were compiled for a target machine more than 10 years out of date. I have seen OpenVMS customers running executables which were compiled for their very first single core Alpha system even though they are now running a quad core. In truth, many never had the source code for purchased systems, but for systems developed in-house they should be scheduling a full build and turn every time they install a significant compiler upgrade? Why? The new compiler will be better at targeting their current CPU arrangement. Every time they upgraded their computer system they got a new CPU which supported all of the old instructions and added new ones. When you tell most compilers to target the CPU you currently have, they can turn out some highly optimized executables. When you compile for a generic single CPU configuration you give up many of the speed improvements you thought you were getting with your hardware upgrade.

Service Oriented Architecture allows companies to keep all of the benefits of their Heritage System while expanding the reach of their business and customer satisfaction level. A very good example would be your bank or credit union. Most still have the same system they have always used, but it provides services which are used by the ATM network and their on-line banking division. The Heritage System which was once only available to you while in your bank's lobby talking to a teller is now available to you both around the clock and around the world.

Data Warehousing was originally conceived as a means of archiving production data in a manner which would one day be usable. Shrewd management teams have now found the ideal way to make data warehousing pay big dividends. Remember that sales pitch about how the existing system couldn't be modified to handle all of the new currencies, export regulations, and foreign laws? Well, in many cases the only false part was the need to “replace” that system. It is far less business risk to purchase a new system which handles all of those foreign countries while continuing to let your Heritage System handle the countries it currently handles well. A good data warehousing team can then extract all of the necessary information at periodic intervals. Once it is all sitting in the data warehouse there are any number of reporting tools which can use it to generate daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual financial reports. Management still gets a global view of the company but they didn't put the entire company at risk to get that view.
Resource: http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/qt_book.html