Maintenance, hosting of legacy applications

Maintenance Outsourcing

Progeni performs the maintenance (and/or hosting) of enterprise class COBOL application suites and associated job control programs.

IT workloads are commonly classified as either development or maintenance. Development averages around 25% of the workload and maintenance (which can occur decades after the application is put into production) often accounts for 75% of the workload. Both are equally suitable for business process outsourcing.

Cost effective, timely and quality software maintenance is now recognized as key to improving the performance of IT. Maintenance has been the subject of misunderstanding by management due to IT's definition differing from managements understanding of what "maintenance" is.

Software maintenance can typically be subdivided into three categories namely:

Corrective Maintenance - Required to repair what has failed due to design, logic and coding errors and typically represents around 20% of maintenance.
Adaptive Maintenance - Required to meet changing regulations, operating environments, hardware configurations, file structures, data formats etc. and represents approximately 20% of maintenance.
Perfective maintenance - Required to improve performance, support new business opportunities or changes to meet extensions/enhancements needs of management and users. Typically, perfective maintenance represents around 60% of overall maintenance effort.

 Software Task Breakdown

Adaptive and perfective maintenance, are tasks that can be defined, priced and delivered in a timely manner by an outsourcing partner, as well as the corrective work associated with programs they have helped develop. This indicates that some 85-90% of all software programming and maintenance tasks can be outsourced if the right methods and processes are in place.

While IT focuses on new technologies and development Progeni applies software maintenance tools to make the greatest impact on the whole life cycle cost of software. These tools provide; formatting to improve code readability, assistance in discovering what dependencies and relationships exist and changing documentation, all key factors in the software maintenance process. In fact the understanding of a software application consumes more time than any other task.