An approach for exposing legacy applications for integration in modern enterprise business processes
Organizations have legacy software applications and systems, which are valuable assets and still critical to their current business operations. One of the key challenges for today’s enterprises is how to effectively and efficiently integrate these legacy assets with other. internal and external applications and business processes. Modernizing legacy systems using SOA may help an organization to meet the increasing demands of the business processes integration while maintaining its large investment in legacy systems. SOA bridges the gap between business processes and technology resulting in improved reuse of existing applications and interoperability of desperate applications. Sometimes it is required to integrate legacy system with other application in a short span of time. As per the business requirements although SOA may address the solution, but it is very difficult to integrate due to several issues in service identification and mapping in legacy application and business processes. In this paper an approach is proposed for participation and alignment of legacy applications in the enterprise business processes in a short span of time with the help of business process modeling and SOA, incorporating both Top down and bottom up approach together. As a case study, the paper describes the exposure of a prototype legacy banking application for participation in a service-oriented architecture. The paper also proposes a novel way of determining the key business logic and resources embedded in a legacy C/C++ application with a reverse engineering approach so that the SOA mapping is automated and the constraints like memory and processing can be analyzed.
