Скачать или смотреть What Is a Legacy System - Robin Crewe

When I used to work for banks, we used to say that a legacy system was any system that was already in production. That is to say, the day after a system went live, it was already considered to be legacy. A long time before that, we had an entire debate about whether mainframe computers were going to disappear (we used to joke that putting a big sign on the side of our mainframe computers saying "Enterprise Server" would be enough to make everybody happy).

I think that the entire distinction between what is and what is not considered legacy has frankly become irrelevant. It is very difficult and takes a lot of time and money to install a core banking system or a major trading system and, once this is installed, banks are not going to change this quickly. Banks may change some of the satellite systems (that is to say, some of the channels around the edge) and in mobile banking we are seeing a relatively regular two to three year refresh cycle where, even if the mobile banking solution works perfectly, the bank will want to refresh this because it at least wants to feel new and modern. Banks are nonetheless using core processing engines for years and years. Some of our customers have been using some of our products for 25 to 30 years which still work, and will continue to work. We are therefore continuing to support these systems, along with the hardware and middleware vendors on whose products our software runs.

I do not think this it is a question of whether systems are legacy, as this would imply that there is a strict line between legacy and non-legacy. Rather, I think systems just get older, and some systems may continue to run even longer for the reason that they still work, the hardware still runs and they are still able to do a good job. Nonetheless, I think that we will see a lot of innovation and a lot faster turnover around the peripheries of this.