Revolutionizing Application Modernization and Evolution

Transform and Analyze with Confidence

With IRIS™, Castor is offering its clients the ability to better support the evolution of their existing IT assets and to drastically reduce their maintenance costs.

IRIS™ is designed to help facilitate the understanding, deep analysis and transformation of applications by creating a standard model based view of the application or system and then using this repository to drive analysis, refactoring and transformation operations.

With the help of our team of professionals, we can help you regain control of your existing systems and rapidly enhance their intrinsic value. At Castor, we are ready to help you discover the value of your existing assets and to assist you in reclaiming the buried knowledge, analyze your evolution options, refactor your applications, re-host them to a new platform or even migrate them to a new language/environment completely.

These highly specialized tasks demands a lot of expertise, skills and support from advanced technology to be effective. This is clearly an aspect where our clients see true benefit from dealing with us.

With IRIS™, Castor is able to deliver measurable ROI and controlled costs. Furthermore, IRIS™ automatically track all of the changes and their impact on testing. This gives you the guarantee that no side effect is overlooked. Testing and QA are not an afterthought, they are built-in from the start.

Application Modernization Approach

Large legacy system modernization initiatives inherently are complex. The use of scenarios in discussing modernization has several benefits. Scenarios provide templates for crafting project objectives, plans and related deliverables. This includes defining tasks, KDM usage and personnel requirements. For a modernization initiative that has multiple scenarios, the use of scenarios as a project management approach can greatly reduce the overall complexity of the initiative or project.

Castor delivers most of its modernization services within the following five scenarios:

I. Application Improvement

The application improvement scenario is a “super scenario” comprised of several sub-scenarios. The goal of this scenario is to improve the robustness, integrity, quality, consistency and/or performance of applications. Activities include the correction of program or system flaws (e.g., recursion), source code restructuring, data definition rationalization or field size standardization.

II. Language-to-Language Conversion

This scenario involves converting one or more information systems from one language to another language.

III. Platform Migration

Moving systems from one platform to another is driven by platform obsolescence or the desire to standardize applications to an organizational standard.

IV. Non-Invasive Application Integration

Organizations with an immediate need to bring a graphically oriented look and feel to end users can utilize middleware technology to replace existing front-ends with Web-based front-ends.

V. Services Oriented Architecture Transformation

The transformation to services oriented architecture involves more than just attaching new front-ends to legacy user interfaces as some analysts mistakenly believe. Because most existing application functionality is embedded in monolithic, functionally and architecturally dated systems, application and data architectures cannot be segregated into services in any useful or meaningful way.

System Evolution

Combining ASTM and KDM analysis information with an understanding of modernization scenarios, decisions can be made as to the evolution of the system. With this level of system knowledge, applicable scenarios can be determined, tasks within that scenario can be identified, and system modernization can be realized.