Thursday, October 15, 2009

Where All That Race to the Top Money is Really Going to End Up

Tim Bray at Oracle Open World:

Legacy · I also asked people about pain points, and they were all over the map, but one did stick out: dealing with legacy. The fact is that companies grow in messy non-linear unpredictable ways, and this almost inevitably leaves behind a messy non-linear inventory of business-critical infrastructure and apps.

Michael Dell in particular hammered away on this in his keynote, and based on what I heard he’s got a point; there’s nothing these people would like better than to get their houses retroactively in order.

The problem is, there’s just no easy way. If you could wave a wand and accomplish it by force of management will, we’d be there by now. I already believed that legacy migration is an area full of great big honking business opportunities, and after this conference, I think I may have been underestimating.

I was struck by the variety of technologies that got the “legacy” label pinned on them. This included COBOL, C++, WebSphere (!?), and back versions of various Oracle products.

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