According to Gartner Group, Trinity Millennium Group, Inc. (TMGi) is one of the nation’s leading legacy application specialty firms. When Gartner published their magic quadrants featuring firms at the forefront of legacy understanding and modernization technology, TMGi was included in both quadrants.

For David Garza, TMGi’s president, Gartner’s recognition further reinforced TMGi’s reputation in the industry where for the past 10 years they have provided Enterprise Portfolio Modernization (EPM) processes, services and licensing for over 200 companies.

WFS: David, how would you characterize TMGi’s core competency?

DG: It’s our ability to process over 90 different enterprise and legacy application source code languages simultaneously through our authored and designed automated technologies.

WFS: When preparing to meet with you, we learned that TMGi has a patent pending?

DG: Yes, Enterprise Portfolio Modernization, consisting of engineering tasks, which have embedded within them 11 automation tools that automate a large portion of the engineering steps. The automated tools were designed to process client applications.

WFS: How many tasks are there?

DG: Eight. Generation of a baseline repository and what we call ‘characterization’ of the legacy app. Source code parsing of the languages. Automatic flowcharting of the programs. Business rule harvesting. Exportation of relevant information from the legacy app for importing into unified modeling languages. Knowledge engineering and requirements analysis. Gap analysis. And forward engineering and transformation to the target system.

WFS: How do you work with clients?

DG: There are two different client scenarios we service. In the first, the focus is on the client who wants us to develop a new software application. Here, we’ll perform three of the tasks: requirements analysis, development plans and development, testing and deployment of the new application.

The second scenario deals with transforming an existing legacy into a more modern, robust application and here, we use all eight of the EPM tasks. Legacy app systems contain a myriad of factual information such as business rules and processes that are the very foundation of the enterprise. They need to be extrapolated, reverse-engineered and modeled to account for them in the newly developed application.

WFS: Hasn’t that been a challenge?

DG: Yes, it’s been the nemesis of legacy transformation projects worldwide. In the past, the problem was how to capture the basis of logic from the existing application to create a point of reference for improvement through transformations.

WFS: Because project teams and software architects now need to measure when improvement and ROIs have been achieved and how they were achieved?

DG: Yes.

WFS: I noticed you said ‘in the past.’

DG: We solved that problem with EPM and automated practices.

WFS: What often prevents firms from migrations?

DG: When IT managers discuss how to move their legacy application systems forward, invariably their discussions digress into analysis paralysis.

WFS: Why?

DG: There’s no existing roadmap of what they have. There is never one person who fully understands all the intricacies of all their applications. To successfully migrate, you need a technical and engineering model of the ‘As-Is’ application environment.

WFS: Then again, legacy applications weren’t built overnight.

DG: Correct. They were built feature-by-feature by separate groups of programmer analysts for separate, unique groups of users at a specific time within the enterprise life cycle. However, what I just said involves three important factors – a unique group of programmers, a unique group of users and a specific time within the life cycle. When transforming legacy applications today those factors are always different. The major disconnect lies in the gap between then and now and it’s our EPM process that bridges this gap to avoid the pitfalls and the black holes you always discover if it’s done manually.

WFS: And therein lies the need for a firm like TMGi.

DG: We like to think so….

For more information, visit www.tringroup.com