Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, has launched Modernization Workbench v2.1, a decision-making tool enabling CIOs to understand, analyze and control existing IT applications, aiding the modernization process and improving flexibility, stability and efficiency.
The Modernization Workbench provides managers and analysts insight into how their applications are structured, enabling business users to identify corporate priorities and quickly translate these into development actions. It provides insight into complex applications (from Cobol to Java), giving development teams a centralized knowledgebase of intelligence about their application portfolio.
"The applications that run your business have to be extremely efficient and adaptable," Peter Mollins, director of product marketing at Micro Focus, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "To get there requires insight into their reality, insight for managers to prioritize and monitor modernization activities, and insight for development teams to quickly execute changes with less re-work. That has led to the explosion in the application understanding space and tremendous demand for the Modernization Workbench. Our solution provides technical users with portfolio-wide analysis while offering business-level governance and visibility to executives."
Modernization Workbench v2.1 was previously produced by Relativity Technologies, which was acquired by Micro Focus in January. The new version extends support for large application portfolios, and demonstrates a commitment to continuous improvement of Relativity's product portfolio. Users can now deploy the Modernization Workbench on either IBM DB2 or Oracle, and it also supports Windows Vista.
The product supports other Micro Focus technologies in enhancing the modernization process, acting as a business intelligence tool for core applications. It uses analytics, visualizations and reports to provide CIOs, architects, analysts and developers with insight into the structure of their applications, driving value by ensuring that scarce resources are allocated correctly and in line with business needs.
"Application understanding helps accelerate a range of modernization options-like reusing proven logic in SOA, architecting toward agile architectures, or identifying and extracting inefficient and non-standard code," Mollins says. "We also see clients broadly deploying the technology within global IT teams. Application understanding allows all team members to become 'instant experts' on the portfolio. This slashes the turn-around time and risk for development activities."
Developers can use the Modernization Workbench to view detailed application documentation and visualizations at the click of a button. IT managers can overlay business views and descriptions onto applications to guarantee that development efforts are more closely-aligned with business strategy. The product brings a number of other benefits, such as improving application quality by highlighting code inefficiencies, locating dead code and applications for retirement, and reducing risk by identifying dependencies between applications.
The new product set "also allows managers to monitor KPIs like the cost, value, complexity, and risk of the application portfolio," Mollins points out. "So our customers can quickly pivot from identifying priorities for modernization to executing them."
For more information, visit the Micro Focus website.