One aspect in harnessing the power of technology has certainly changed busi-
One aspect in harnessing the power of technology has certainly changed busi-
enterprise architecture is to maximize and ness operations. However, there’s a
fine-tune the benefits of a service-oriented new approach for managing technical
architecture (SOA), which can lower resources that goes beyond changing
costs by sharing services, create agility individual operations and instead aligns
by orchestrating services, and improve
all of IT more closely to business strategy. interoperability between application silos. Enterprise architecture is a method and
“SOA is an empowering vehicle for organizing principle that aligns functional
legacy modernization projects,” says
business objectives and strategies with an Lance Knowlton, vice president of plat- IT strategy and execution plan.
form migrations at Oracle. “By taking the “The overriding objective of enterprise
most-costly legacy systems and modern- architecture is to direct the evolution and
izing them with SOA, you can provide a
transformation of enterprises with technol- framework for moving other legacy ser- ogy,” says Mark Salser, senior vice presi-
vices to a lower-cost platform.” dent of the Enterprise Solutions Group
This architecture development process at Oracle. “This in turn makes IT a more
provides the structure for an enterprise strategic asset for successfully imple-
architecture that can optimize the use menting a modern business strategy.”
of shared services in an organization. In reorganizing its legacy system, for
REVIVING LEGACY SOFTWARE ASSETS example, Deutsche Leasing leveraged Enterprise architecture is a professional
SOA principles to construct a completely discipline that starts with matching busi-
new architecture with new workflows and ness requirements to an architectural vision business processes while retaining all of (considering governance, current state of
its old business-relevant knowledge.
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I-HUA CHEN
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
The company offers a range of leasing services and insur- ance packages for both movable and nonmovable assets, such as information and communications technology assets, machinery and industrial equipment, medical tech- nology, fleet management, and energy products.
Deutsche Leasing had to find a way to modernize more than 80 software applications developed over three decades and deployed primarily on IBM mainframe computers. The computer languages included COOL:Gen, Mantis, Cobol, Assembler, and Smalltalk—more than 8 million lines of source code in all. According to Peter Kox, head of Development International and Services at Deutsche Leasing, expanding this complex IT environment on the existing platforms was an expensive, dead-end prospect that extended the company’s reliance on obsolete technol- ogy and a dwindling base of legacy skills. “Our mainframe applications were facing the end of their useful life, so we decided to step into a modern Java EE [Java Platform, Enterprise Edition] architecture,” he says.
Kox, who served as program manager for the migration to the Java EE/Oracle platform, says the legacy applications were not well documented and not particularly scalable. Worse still, making changes was time consuming and risky to the business; taking down and revising a module often
had unforeseen consequences. Deutsche Leasing wanted a
Enterprise architecture provides the performance Deutsche Leasing needs while opening
access to a large pool of developers. “It’s much quicker to make changes,” says Peter
new architecture that would duplicate the legacy function-
Kox (right), pictured with Otto Schmitz.
ality and add new capabilities as well. “Most companies start the modernization journey Founded in 1962, Deutsche Leasing is the largest finance
focused on solving a specific tactical pain point,” says Barry leasing company in Germany and one of the top five in Europe. Perkins, vice president of Oracle Modernization at Oracle.
TON HENDRIKS