[Info-vax] Real live example...

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2023-02-20 kl. 15:57, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
> On 2/20/2023 9:32 AM, bill wrote:
>> On 2/20/2023 9:12 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 2/20/2023 8:01 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>>>  From a press release last week:
>>>>
>>>> "Tietoevry is a longstanding Telia partner and will serve as a 
>>>> strategic advisor to the project, which will start at the beginning of 
>>>> March 2023. As part of the code and data migration process, Tietoevry 
>>>> will harness Advanced’s professional services capabilities, automated 
>>>> transformation tooling, and runtime components to eliminate Telia 
>>>> Finance Final’s current dependency on OpenVMS. This includes migrating 
>>>> an estimated 1.5 million lines of COBOL code plus other programming 
>>>> languages to the cloud-ready language, Java."
>>>>
>>>> Press release:
>>>> https://modernsystems.oneadvanced.com/news-and-opinion/telia-finance-selects-tietoevry--advanced-for-application-modernization-initiative/
> 
>>>  > Generally about their services for OpenVMS:
>>>  > https://modernsystems.oneadvanced.com/services/openvms/
>>>
>>> There are companies specializing in migrating
>>> from socalled "legacy" platforms to socalled "modern"
>>> platforms
> 
>> The really funny thing about this is while migrating from legacy
>> hardware to modern hardware for reasons like availability and
>> expense are probably valid, that doesn't mean you should re-write
>> your applications into totally different languages.  In particular
>> going from a language designed to do the work you need done to a
>> language with no particular target for what it is supposed to do.
> 
> For a Cobol/VMS application there are multiple options:
> 1) stay on Cobol/VMS
> 2) change both language and platform like to Java/Linux (*)
> 3) change just platform like to Cobol/Linux
> 4) change just language like to Java/VMS
> 
> Telia chose #2. They could have chosen #3.
> 
> More companies pick #2 than #3. They want to get off
> Cobol and if they need to start a huge migration project
> to change platform then they want to change the language
> as well (changes in some code due to different context +
> changes to operations + full test + project overhead is
> not that much smaller than change all code +
> changes to operations + full test + project overhead).
> 
> Note that the option VSI really want #4 is even rarer.
> 
> :-(
> 
> *) could also be C#/Linux or Go/Linux or polyglot/Linux
> (like node.js for frontend and Java for backend all on Linux),
> but Telia was supposedly Java.
> 
> Arne
> 


It will be very interesting to follow this project.
*If* it fails, it would be the first failed Java migration.

One could think that a "mission-critical finance engine"
would be a good target for a Cobol based platform...