Ciber, a veteran IT products and services provider that brings in nearly $1 billion in annual revenue yet flies way below most people's radar, has released a new product that many enterprises may want to use immediately: It automates application modernization.
With operating systems, mobile and desktop business computers, business requirements and other factors constantly evolving or reaching end of life, legacy business applications -- even though they work satisfactorily -- simply cannot keep up with all this change and become outdated, often through no fault of their own.
Ciber Momentum, powered by the company's Engineer re-platforms application, was launched Aug. 12 to help enterprises move their applications safely to modern architectures. The new package removes the drudgery of de-commissioning old versions of apps and installing new versions, not to mention the retraining of employees and reconfiguration of systems.
Ciber claims that Engineer delivers high-quality code that is 80 percent to 85 percent software-generated without any proprietary lock-in or additional software burden–saving a lot of time compared to traditional, manual and tool-based conversion. Ciber Momentum automates the process by transforming legacy applications into cloud-, mobile- and digital-ready business apps.
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"A lot of CIOs look at application modernization as a top initiative and investment priority," Michael Boustridge, Ciber's president and CEO, told eWEEK. "Until now, application modernization was predominately a people-based model and involved laboriously rewriting software."
Using Ciber Momentum, according to Boustridge, enterprises can:
--shift the IT labor pyramid to be more competitive in talent, capabilities and cost;
--free up time spent on application maintenance for strategic, market-driven initiatives;
--give users access to information anytime, anywhere via the cloud, and
--extend the value of application investments today, tomorrow and well into the future.
Another driver for this type of functionality is the fact that legacy applications are a major barrier to cloud migration. Ciber Momentum re-architects legacy applications into cloud-ready business solutions that meet the needs of social and mobile users, Boustridge said.
Ciber, based in Greenwood Village, Colo., a suburb of Denver, was founded in 1974. It built itself atop the acquisitions of 66 other companies. Ciber makes and maintains 15 suites of software and services, has 6,500 employees, and still does business with its first customer, the Ford Motor Co., Boustridge told eWEEK.
Acquiring 66 companies undoubtedly made for some very complicated IT, sales, HR, accounting and CRM system problems, as well as relationships.
"A lot of the 'spaghetti' had to be undone, so we've put in a new organizational structure that's got the word 'global' in it," Boustridge, a former chief marketing officer at EDS and division president of British Telecom, said.
Since the Y2K days of the late '90s, when there was a plethora of specially built applications designed to read old (pre-2000) code and replace it with new post-2000 code, there really hasn't been anything in the marketplace that performs the same general function, Boustridge said.
"CSC came out recently with a CIO survey that said up to 70 percent of IT budgets are constrained because they support all of the old apps, and only 30 percent of the money is being spent on new applications," Boustridge said. "Yet the demand to move to the cloud and to a modernized environment is more prolific, and the buyer has been shifted from the IT guy to multiple business units, and the business units are saying, 'I can't wait, I'm just going to do some cloud-type services,' which is why Amazon AWS and everyone else have taken off."
Ciber Momentum is globally available now. For more information, go here.
