Nowadays, companies competing successfully in highly dynamic, global markets understand the importance of a rationalized enterprise IT infrastructure that enables operational flexibility and business agility. In many sectors, especially electronic banking and e-commerce, business agility has become a prerequisite for corporate survival. Here companies are looking to implement enterprise-wide changes that allow them to reduce costs, boost business performance, and enable faster time to market. In particular, they need to ensure that their IT infrastructure has the flexibility to accommodate new business segments and value chains in order to support mergers, acquisitions, and evolving business strategies.

 

Atos Origin is the exploitation manager in the TAO Project and provides the connection between the project outcomes and best business practices to the market, providing market analysis and potential customers

 

After an analysis of the market demands, through a PEST trends (Political, Economic, Socio-cultural and Technological) drive new needs (both opportunities and threats) in the market place. These market demands are looking for a way to be met. Businesses and companies are restructuring and updating their IT systems to reflect the new political and economic realities. Next figure represents the trends and business impact of the emerging technologies in the different business areas. This figure is the result of a study guided by the ATOS team involved in the TAO project.

 

 

TAO outcomes and Atos Origin's complementary business expertise provides a roadmap that ensures a realistic transition from your current legacy models and applications to more flexible, more agile, open and semantics-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This solution is applied in several sectors in order to provide to the customers the adaptivity and performance they need to manage, change and address new business challenges. TAO is proposed within the scope of a SOA solution, legacy IT systems will undoubtedly be part of the final implementation.

 

 

Aligning IT with your business objectives

 

Companies today face two broad challenges: how to enable adaptive enterprise operations and how to keep in step with evolving business demands. Due to globalisation and internationalism of some markets, knwoledge intensive services developments of complex supply chain solutions is taking place

The need of business agility and speed will benefit from SOA impacting across many parts of the business. Also, brought together with Legacy systems management, SOA and Semantic SOA can provide richness and profitable advance of the legacy systems, updating them to a more flexible, accesible and worthwhile systems. The solution proposed by TAO give to the customers a improve on efficiency and a reduce of costs

Some sectors as Public Sector, Automative, Construction, Banking, Industrials, CPG trying to find solutions to their duplicate, lack of agility and redundant legacy systems. These legacy systems are the cause of inefficiencies and high costs, and in a ever changing world, these costs incresed due to the markets demands. So, for the companies and organisations are becoming ever more key looking for a platform solution for growth, and TAO outcomes provide this solution.

Two approaches to software evolution appear to be on the decline. First, it is rarely possible, because of huge investments in legacy systems that have evolved over many years, to replace those systems and start from scratch. So the “big bang� approach to software migration is not often feasible. Second, it is increasingly less attractive to continue maintaining traditional (functional) legacy systems at the lowest level of abstraction, expecting them to evolve into maintainable assets. So the fine-grained maintenance approach is also undesirable because it neither adds value to the asset nor provides for future leverage.

 

For TAO purposes, once the company decides to evolve their legacy systems, the process is fully guided by the TAO Suite and each step may be validated. The next figure illustrates a UML activity diagram of the RMM approach (Source: informit.com). Ovals in the diagram represent activities. Arrows represent transition between activities. The horizontal synchronization bars require completion of the previous activities before starting new ones. The process starts with a modernization project that has been selected using portfolio analysis. The end state for the process is an integrated modernization plan. The so-called risk-managed modernization approach is the following:

 

 

Many firms are considering the “transition� of their legacy systems toward distributed open system environments. Most of these efforts are often not very successful because they focus only on a reduced set of software issues without fully considering the broader context of cross organizational management and technical issues. The TAO methodology and the relative supporting tools try to cover the whole environment in which system transition takes place and offer a deep insight into tasks, processes, and software artifacts that comprise the disciplined transitioning of legacy systems. The steps included in TAO methodology identify from a practical point of view all the critical issues corresponding to the components of the initial legacy system. Results coming out from the project case studies provide a deep insight useful for developing a coherent set of management and technical best practices to achieve an organized approach to systems evolution. The pressure faced by IT service providers to evolve their customers systems in order to respond quickly and better to market needs and rapidly fading technologies is tremendous. To this, it must be added the increasing customer expectations, the necessity to react to new enterprise standards, interoperate with new products and system functionalities, boost performance, manage new software releases, and cope with hardware and software obsolescence. To adequately modernize legacy systems in a quickly changing environment, IT managers look constantly to answers for the following topics:

• How can we tackle systematically all the issues arising during system transitioning?
• How to plan the transition and reengineering of a complex system effectively?
• What are the factors that determine the success of system transition?
• How is it possible to know if we are following the right path?
• Is it possible to transition a system without severely affecting its functionalities?

Both case studies developed in TAO try to give answers to these questions through the application of the methodology. Both case studies represent an abstraction of typical situation encountered in the many industrial environments. From one side we have GATE, a typical data intensive application rich of material automatically or semi-automatically updated. On the other side, Dassault case study is a typical knowledge intensive application in which the management and structuring of domain specific knowledge play a crucial role. The analysis of both case studies will be very valuable for organizations that want to take the right decisions before starting a complex transitioning project.

 

The following are three values offered by semantic technology:

 

	Semantic data integration: Data from different sources is arranged according to different schemas. The enterprise needs a single point of access for all data, integrated into an intelligent whole.
	Concept-based search: Search over a corpus of documents can proceed using a search that matches concepts, rather that matching words.
	Semantic "publish and subscribe": Information is marked-up by content providers in a way that allows it to be searched by semantically meaningful tags.

 

In brief, we have detected potential applications in fields related with e-commerce and/or technical help desk, where trustworthiness is critical. Sometimes, we may find monolithic applications in such environments, where TAO could be pointed out as a promising solution. Semantic integration provides value proportional to the number and importance of the databases and legacy applications that are integrated. Applications that support collaboration are only as valuable as the size and activity of the communities that collaborate. This means that semantic technologies are disruptive. That is, there are markets in which their performance is currently inferior to established technologies, but there are other markets in which their unique capabilities provide value. As for any disruptive technology, the early successes can only happen in the innovative markets. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is at the heart of many business-transformation efforts. Many enterprises approach SOA transformation incrementally, using their valuable legacy IT systems to participate as service providers. This is a key factor in adopting TAO as the mean for transitioning their legacy systems prior to attach the legacy to the SOA infrastructure. The solution architect pursues the same objectives of TAO, but in a bigger scale: to ensure that enterprise-wide business operations remain robust and compliant. For that, the architect develops an information management strategy that can be part of the SOA and maintain overall data and content consistency across all business operations. Usually, business operations are designed around a set of services that require current IT systems to be re-engineered and integrated as service providers. Among them, there could be legacy IT systems, suited to be targeted by TAO.

 

There is an open range of talks inside ATOS ORIGIN to dig into the legacy systems and main concerns of current IT systems in different sectors. TAO is offered as a proof of concept of semantic technology benefits in non-technological environments, leveraging the functionality of an existing legacy system. This establishment of a beachhead, in the sense of crossing the chasm, will help us to move forward toward an integrated vision of enterprise-wide interoperability.

 

 

Links of interest

 

	Approach to IT Providers presentation .PPT
	IT Service Management Wikipedia description
	Legacy system Wikipedia description

 

D1.1.2 - Requirement analysis and assessment of relevant methodologies - v2

D1.2 - SWS bootstrapping methodology

D5.1 - Evaluation of existing SWS tools and infrastructure

D7.1 - Case study 2: Requirements analysis and application of TAO methodology - Synthesis report

D7.2 - Case study 2: Domain ontology and semantic augmentation of legacy content

Project Demo Project Video Project Dissemination Video Software Demos and Downloads Publicity Materials Published Papers Public Deliverables

 

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