July 30, 2015 By: Prabhu Jha
In a fast-paced, Internet-dominated world, where technology is evolving in real time, the presence of legacy applications in organizations can prove to be risky, slowing down their growth and preventing them from achieving global competitiveness.
The Progress platform, once extremely popular among the customer community and adopted by thousands of organizations worldwide, has undergone several changes and upgrades. However, companies that have not embraced the newer and cutting-edge technologies are facing problems. Enterprises with older Progress legacy applications are finding it tough to remain productive in an environment where new age web and mobile technologies rule.
Clearly, they have a reason to modernize and keep up with prevailing technology trends that include the Cloud, Social Media, E-commerce, Mobile and Analytics.
There are several reasons why organizations need to modernize their Progress applications:
- Poorer System Performance: Older Progress applications which are not designed or optimized for state-of-the-art platforms are proving to be a challenge for companies. They are not only lowering the performance of the IT systems of organizations, but they are also preventing them from scaling, as demands from both internal and external customers increase.
- High Maintenance Costs: Legacy Progress apps, as in the case of all older software, have become difficult and costly to maintain. This is owing to the fact that the old technology cannot keep pace with the dynamic requirements of the business. As more tactical development is taking place, it is adding to the support burden.
- Lack of People Skills: As the technology has become less popular, people with expertize on Progress too has decreased. Finding and retaining manpower that can support legacy Progress applications has become difficult. Besides, the new generation of IT engineers prefers to work on cutting-edge technologies that offer them an advantage in the job market and make them more employable.
- Older Architecture: The inflexible architecture of the older versions of Progress prevents companies from web-enabling and integrating their applications with newer mediums like the browser and the mobile. This is leading to a poorer customer experience, as today, most clients require applications that meet the needs of their mobile workforce.
- Slow Down in the Product Life Cycle: Companies using legacy Progress apps typically find it expensive and time-consuming to develop new applications on this older platform. Getting new offerings to market quickly, therefore, is a major challenge, causing them to become uncompetitive. They are also slow to respond to the dynamic and fast-changing needs of customers.
Companies running an application on an unsupported version of Progress (say a version older than 9.1E or 10.2B), are simply sitting on a ticking time bomb, where a disaster is waiting to happen. When they encounter a problem, they are unlikely to receive help or recover from the huge losses they incur. Their business itself could be at risk.
These reasons are creating a compelling need for companies with Progress applications to standardize, modernize, and consolidate their application portfolios. They need to do this in order to future-proof their technology investments, improve their market competitiveness and staunch the loss of revenues resulting from these aging apps.
