HP today announced new Application Modernization capabilities to help customers transform their legacy enterprise applications into an environment that is better aligned to change. HP can help customers to deploy modernized application solutions that maintain their competitive advantage and improve agility.

The new transformation capabilities include:

- HP Modernization 'Factories' - a comprehensive set of processes, methodologies and tools based on HP's proven experience in applications re-hosting and re-engineering

- HP Modernization Showcase Centers – a demonstration environment to help customers with all the phases of application modernization including conceptualization and implementation.

- HP Legacy Application Transformation and Visual Intelligence Tools - rich data visuals based on scientific and technical analysis to help customers analyze the structure and composition of their legacy applications. The tools include: 

• HP Modernization Profile - Analyzes an application's composition to assist in the selection of areas that may be the key contributors to high cost and low levels of flexibility.
• HP Clone Set Analyzer - Identifies duplicate code to avoid repetition of modernization efforts and provide economies of scale to reduce costs.
• HP Clone Pattern Analyzer - Reveals hidden patterns of code reuse to help group together similar applications and ensure tasks are not duplicated.

These offerings provide our customers with a simple, efficient way to decompose and transform their legacy applications based upon scientific analysis, while providing a clear cost/benefit analysis to project potential savings and return on investment.

From my own personal experience, core business applications need to be fast, flexible and cost effective and when they aren't, it's just pain, pain, pain throughout the whole organisation. However, with a properly modernized enterprise application, the pain just goes away and frees up an organisation to get on with doing something more valuable. Tools and processes like HP have announced today are essential to "free up" the core knowledge and value within legacy apps, and to manage the risks involved with transformation.