Successful software has to evolve to keep it compatible and up to date. Up to 90% of software cost is spent on maintenance and of this 75% is spent on the development of new features for staying competitive. The industry progresses through periods of incremental development interlaced with true paradigm shifts.
We are currently experiencing one of these paradigm shifts, as remarked by the European Commission: “The speed of change in Internet technologies continues to be impressive. Software is becoming more and more pervasive: it runs on the devices that we use every day …[opening] a new world of possible applications” cf. Cloud computing, Internet of Services and Advanced Software Engineering, European Union, 2011 (doi:10.2759/47598).
Accordingly, more and more traditional software vendors notice the need to transform their current business and technology model in order to remain competitive. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is seen as the most promising way to achieve this change. However, this transition from Software-off-the-shelf (often residing as legacy applications) to SaaS is a tremendous challenge comprising business, application and technical issues.
Having an automated, vendor, technology and hardware independent way to migrate an application would permit the software to evolve easily even in case of transition to new paradigms.
ARTIST proposes a software migration approach covering the premigration and postmigration phases. The premigration phase analyzes the technical and non-technical consequences of migrations, supporting the decision-making process on how a migration should be done. The migration phase itself is based on Model Driven Engineering techniques to automate the reverse engineering of the legacy applications to platform independent models. These models are the input for the forward engineering process to generate and deploy modernized applications and to support future migrations. In the postmigration phase, the modernized applications are certified with respect to the stated goals of the premigration phase.
ARTIST will reduce the risk, time and cost of migrating legacy software. It will lower the barriers for companies (with existing software) wanting to take advantage of the latest technologies and business models, particularly when considering the current benefits of Cloud Computing and SaaS.