Astadia helps enterprises modernize legacy systems and take the safest and shortest path from mainframe to cloud.

Large enterprises have traditionally depended on the strength and performance of mainframe systems. However managing these platforms and has become increasingly difficult in recent years due to skyrocketing costs, an acute shortage in mainframe skills, and technical integration challenges.

Astadia, Scott G. Silk, Chairman and CEO, says, “Companies clinging to legacy technology will find it highly challenging to integrate with modern applications, cloud services, and other emerging technologies like AI and machine learning.”

This lack of integration is hampering innovation and prevents businesses from leveraging the advantages of new opportunities in the digital transformation age and industry 4.0. Ultimately, it limits organizations’ ability to keep up with their more agile and innovative competitors.

This is where Astadia comes in. As a software-enabled mainframe migration leading provider, Astadia helps organizations modernize their legacy systems and move to the cloud. This allows them to embrace the latest technological advancements to pivot quickly and respond to changing market demands and consumer preferences.

A growing cloud computing market 

There is an increased interest in modernizing and moving mainframe workloads to the cloud, with three main drivers compelling IT and business leaders to put cloud computing at the top of their agenda:

1. Mainframe skills shortage: There is an acute shortage of skilled experts as generations of mainframe developers reach retirement age. About 60% of mainframe technology specialists are more than 50 years of age. Hiring experienced developers with knowledge of modern object-oriented languages such as C# and Java and familiarity with relational databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and similar platforms is easier. By converting legacy platforms, organizations can tap into a large pool of talented developers and take advantage of object-oriented programming and agile development practices.

2. Increased maintenance and licensing fees for legacy mainframe applications: The burgeoning licensing and maintenance fees are forcing organizations to look for ways to control and optimize IT budgets. As the user base dwindles, the remaining mainframe customers are confronted with rising license fees and a lack of support. Liberating core business applications from their dependency on legacy technologies is the main solution to this challenge. With Astadia, organizations can save about 60-90% annually by transforming their legacy mainframe applications.

3. Lack of agility, scalability, and integration: Mainframe systems are not well-suited for integrating modern systems and architectures that support real-time processing, AI-powered personalization, and next-generation digital experiences.

These trends will impact more and more enterprises, especially the dynamic markets relying heavily on large amounts of data and transactions, like financial services and telecom.

Astadia supports enterprises and government agencies in solving all these challenges by modernizing and migrating their core business systems to the cloud.

A holistic approach to cloud migration

Astadia offers a holistic view of legacy application modernization and enterprise cloud adoption at scale. It supports large, complex, highly regulated, security-conscious organizations in modernizing mission-critical applications and moving mainframe workloads to the cloud at scale, faster, and safely.

By taking this approach, organizations can solve their mainframe-related challenges, achieve ROI faster, and accelerate digital transformation.

One major project that Astadia undertook was the modernization of the United States Air Force (USAF) mainframe, a mission-critical system that serves over 260,000 users in support of global warfighting capabilities.

The system was among the Federal Government’s top 10 most critical legacy systems in need of modernization, facing escalating system costs, aging hardware, potential security vulnerabilities, and a lack of qualified personnel.

Astadia helped USAF modernize its mainframe system in the cloud, preserving existing investments while preparing the way for digital transformation. The project won the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s (AFCEA) Distinguished Award for Excellence in Engineering in December 2021.

Foyer Group, a key player in the European financial landscape, is another relevant case for Astadia. The complexity of the core business systems required a highly specialized approach. Foyer worked with Astadia to refactor their COBOL and EGL-based legacy applications to modern platforms. This allowed Foyer to retire its mainframe system, cut all the associated costs, create an open cloud-ready infrastructure, and optimize processes, leading to shorter time to market, which is crucial in a competitive fintech market that has grown explosively.

Astadia FastTrack for cloud migration  

Three factors establish Astadia’s uniqueness in the marketplace. The first one is their specialized focus on mainframes and the team's deep expertise. The company has completed over 300 mainframe modernization projects with a 97% success rate in a market where the average is substantially lower.

This is vitally important as about 85% of the skills and knowledge required to migrate to the cloud are mainframe-centric. Secondly, the company prides itself on the factory software model with the highest degree of automation in the market.

Astadia’s FastTrack factory is a collection of tools and processes that reduces risk from complex software transformation projects. It fully automates code transformation, data conversion and testing allowing clients to reduce costs and timeframes in cloud migration projects.

FastTrack enables enterprises to refactor their legacy mainframes to the cloud or other destinations in a safe and secure manner. The platform automatically transforms programming languages and databases like COBOL, Assembler, Natural, and ADABAS into modern equivalents like Java, C#, PostgreSQL, Aurora, and SQL Server in the cloud.

Recently, Astadia joined Amdocs, a market-leading software and services provider that operates globally to help organizations accelerate mainframe modernization and cloud migration, differentiate in the 5G era, and digitalize and automate their operations.

“While Astadia’s FastTrack solves all mainframe critical issues, Amdocs’s surrounding SI services deliver an end-to-end solution for mainframe migration through cloud engineering services, quality engineering (testing), data and analytics services, AI/ML, managed services, Prime SI services and more”, Silk says.