I was at Insurtech Hartford last week and had a great time talking to people in the insurance industry. There was a particular panel discussion which has been on my mind since. During the panel discussion one of the panelists said enterprises shouldn’t migrate but should instead integrate and then leverage that to build modern services for customers. This is called Modernization in Place by many groups. Others such as Gartner use the term encapsulation.
Modernization in Place makes sense in some cases but it isn’t the only viable option. Each company should choose the option that best fits their specific needs. Some enterprises want to stop maintaining hardware, others see their COBOL developers retiring, and others want the scalability that comes with moving to the cloud. These requirements tend to lean towards replatforming, rehosting, or replacing as the best options. I will explain all of these options in detail in subsequent blogs but the point is this is the choice of the enterprise not a vendor.
After the panel, I wound up in a discussion with someone from an insurance carrier. He laughed at what was said and we both agreed that it is fine to have opinions but a vendor should never tell an enterprise that there is only one relevant option for modernization. That is just too presumptive.
As a vendor, it isn’t our role to tell an enterprise to choose one modernization option over another. Typically the vendor who says this only supports that one paradigm. It is OK for a vendor to only support a certain paradigm but without knowing the customer’s situation, and strategic objectives, we never should have a specific rule.
Luckily here at OpenLegacy, our Hub platform has the flexibility to support all the modernization paradigms including modernization in place, replatforming or replacing. We welcome the opportunity to understand each enterprise's specific objectives and challenges they are facing. Then we can review options for how OpenLegacy fits into the enterprise's modernization journey and provide the greatest value.
Our legacy modernization webpage explains some of the options in more detail and includes links to assets with more information.
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