The elimination of dependency on a mainframe technology that has an uncertain future is often a core reason to migrate. However, although decreasing ongoing IT operational costs is certainly a key driver for many, the benefits of migrating to an open environment can and do equate to much more than just cost savings. The following is a list of the most common benefits which underpin an organization’s decision to migrate…
 
Financial benefits
When a company’s core business application is run on open systems architecture they typically do so with substantially lower external costs. Ongoing cost savings can equate to as much as 70%.
 
Operational benefits
Open environments enable easy integration and implementation of package based solutions.
Open architecture that is implemented allows the organization access to programming and support skills available in the general market thereby eliminating dependency on an ever-decreasing resource base that does not attract new talent.
Open environments improve on the availability of the core business systems.
Open architecture provides for substantial scaling in capacity.
 
Productivity benefits
Open environments provide for substantially improved development productivity and allow organizations to reduce the time to market of new products and services by up to 50%.
New system environments are able to deliver substantial improvements in performance and capacity and specifically; a reduction in online response times of 30% and a batch runtime reduction of 50% are very often possible.
 
Competitive benefit
All benefits of migration combine to allow an organization to better compete in its marketplace.
Open environments allow an organization to be better prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the future.
 
Risk mitigation benefit
There are genuine market concerns as to how long Unisys will support its underlying technology. Migrating as soon as possible to an open platform mitigates this risk. This begs the often-quoted question in the modernization debate: What is the cost of NOT migrating?