APPLICATIONS

As organizations migrate from mainframes, Windows solution ecosystem flourishes. The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) today announced that over 100 organizations have joined since its founding. The MMA originated in 2004 as a response to the need for education and coordinated alternatives to legacy systems. Organizations now face rapidly evolving business and technical challenges, which legacy systems were not designed to handle. As the relative strengths of legacy systems diminish compared with the innovation of newer platforms, organizations that belong to the MMA offer the expertise and knowledge to modernize their infrastructure and generate value. “Listening to market trends, we heard many concerns about the lack of agility and costs of maintaining legacy, mainframe solutions,” said Spyros Sakellariadis, director of Legacy Modernization at Microsoft Corp. “Working with other vendors, system integrators and OEMs, the MMA was born to help customers understand that existing options can deliver value and competitive advantages. The MMA recognizes and thanks all the outstanding members for their participation and willingness to help facilitate the transition of its common customers from mainframe systems to the Microsoft Windows Server platform.” With more than 40 new members in the past year, the MMA enjoys accelerating growth, despite member turnover as the legacy market consolidates. Today, the membership consists of several OEMs, more than 30 software vendors, and over 50 system integrators and other service providers. “By participating in the MMA,” said Sandor Rosenberg, chairman and chief executive officer of Information Analysis Inc., “we have been able to build our pipeline of potential customers, and we expect to convert that pipeline into additional customers in the future years.” “We see the breadth of membership as essential to offering a full range of choices to organizations as they decide how to integrate, re-host, re-platform and rewrite their legacy applications,” said Susan Tauzer, Itanium marketing director at Intel Corporation. “The MMA represents the leading edge of a larger community that delivers and deploys workloads on Windows that were historically the domain of big iron.” Members of the MMA find the alliance provides value through visibility in the market and networking with peers. The marketplace also benefits from better solutions due to the advocacy of MMA and its members. “The Alliance provides tangible value to legacy system owners by pooling the information they need to make an informed decision on modernization and the resources they need to effectively implement their migration,” said Ron Langer, vice president of Legacy Modernization at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. “For example, our NeoSuite products give an excellent route for CICS/batch/COBOL applications to .NET- based technologies, but there are always other components in a migration such as archive management or migration services, and the MMA enables the partnerships to provide the full solution.” In the future, the MMA will continue to expand its role in education by sponsoring white papers, webcasts and other enabling content. Interested organizations can learn more about the Mainframe Migration Alliance and its members at its Web site.