CA Telon is a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) application development environment that was originally conceived and designed by Chris McNeil and Don Christensen in the late 1970s.
McNeil and Christensen set out on a mission to ease the development of the presentation layer on the IBM 3790 minicomputer, which became the code generator we now know as CA Telon. From there Telon’s functionality grew, gaining popularity in the insurance industry and beyond.
As the IT landscape has evolved, CA Telon has presented challenges that have driven users to look for alternatives. First, developers familiar with CA Telon are increasingly difficult to find, with most reaching retirement age. Second, due to its run-time elements, CA Telon’s licensing costs continue to accrue. Last but not least, its development benefits and integration capabilities fall severely flat when paired with modern technology platforms.
To help you build your business case for migrating CA Telon, we offer a process that will help ensure your success. Our fully automated approach guarantees accuracy and consistency before, during, and after the CA Telon migration
process.
Starting with the fundamental question, why modernize CA Telon, consider these benefits to your business:
Lower Total Cost of System Ownership
The ability to move to a lower cost platform and more open source technologies can greatly impact your bottom line, generating flexibility to add resources to other critical areas. A recent study by HPE, Micro Focus, Microsoft, and Unisys Corporation estimates that the equivalent of 1,715 MIPS could run on one 8-CPU Intel Xeon enterprise-class system. The difference in cost between the two platforms is illustrative of the substantial savings organizations are able to realize when migrating away from mainframe systems.
Most organizations with mainframe-based systems are spending close to 75 percent of their development resources to simply maintain existing applications, leaving only 25 percent of their development resources with time to strategize solutions to deliver value to the business.
Effecting a 25-percent reduction in maintenance costs means that investment in business-driven IT advancements can be almost doubled.
Avoid Feature Freeze
Many companies are running mission-critical applications on legacy systems that do not have a roadmap for significant feature improvement. In the case of CA Telon, few significant features have been added in over a decade. Unlike modern platforms, CA Telon’s development roadmap doesn’t accurately reflect the value of the data stored on the platform.
Get Ahead of Diminishing Skills & Resources
For legacy platforms such as CA Telon, programmers are becoming increasingly difficult to find. The reality is, people who know mainframe technology are steadily retiring. To make matters worse, most universities no longer offer mainframe instruction. As the shortage of experienced programmers grows, the cost of these resources will continue to rise.
Accelerate your Ability to Respond to Competitive Pressures
Lack of frameworks, productive and advanced IDEs, debugging Lack of frameworks, productive and advanced IDEs, debugging tools, and test automation add significant time to development cycles on the mainframe. Relying on legacy systems can make you sluggish when it comes to responding to challenges from competitors.
In recent years, digital transformation, underpinned by modern agile practices such as continuous integration and DevOps, has further exacerbated the troubles associated with sluggish development cycles in legacy environments. Even if new applications are developed using modern technologies, integrating these with core business functionality running on legacy systems is a risky and time intensive task.
Each of Modern Systems’ CA Telon automated conversion solution options deliver applications with 100 percent like-for-like functionality as compared to the legacy assets. This reduces cost, allows for deeper integration, expands the potential pool of resources capable of maintaining code, unshackles organizations from outdated languages and expensive licenses, and unlocks infinite customization potential to meet any business requirements.
Best of all, by using our solutions you can even increase the productivity of existing CA Telon developers in process.
To read more about our solutions, including a successful case study with Swedish insurance giant, Folksom, read our white paper, ‘We Won’t Telon You Anymore.’
