By Julie Fouque, Vice President of Marketing
One of the main drivers for application decommissioning is cost take out—the reduction or elimination of expenses for maintaining outdated, unsupported legacy applications in read-only mode often due to regulatory requirements.
Organizations decommission legacy applications to relieve themselves of the financial burden associated with aging systems, while migrating data from those systems to a single, XML-based repository that ensures easy access to all legacy data and facilitates regulatory compliance.
Show Me the Cost Savings
But you may be asking yourself how much you can save by retiring your legacy systems. To give you an idea, try OpenText’s online assessment.
- Step 1: Plug in the types of legacy applications you have (VAX/VMS, AS/400, IBM Z9 Mainframe, IBM 370, or other applications).
- Step 2: Indicate the amount you roughly pay in software maintenance per year and the amount you pay in hardware system maintenance per year.
- Step 3: Then plug in your amount of both Tier-1 and Tier-2 storage.
The tool shows you your potential cost savings in real time, and it lets you calculate cost take out across a number of applications.
Want to Save More? Consider Active Archiving
The online assessment also lets you see how you can increase your cost savings through active archiving–allowing archived data to be actively queried, reported, and integrated with other data for business analytics.
To get a sense of what you might save through active archiving:
- Step 1: Indicate your amount of Tier-1 and Tier-2 storage.
- Step 2: Estimate the amount of non-system information that is eligible to be moved from Tier 1 to Tier 2 storage.
- Step 3: Estimate the amount of inactive information as a percentage of total information.
With these numbers in hand, you should be hard pressed to make a case for NOT retiring your legacy applications—because the cost of doing nothing with your legacy applications is likely higher than you can afford.
