Fernando Labastida: Technology, Austin, Latin America

With all the buzz and sexiness of SOA and web services, vendors have created an environment where customers feel inferior if they don’t have the latest modern application.  However, these applications are nothing without data. Data is the one constant at a company, whereas software has become a disposable item. At our company, we have gone through about four different CRM applications, but we have kept the data on our customers.

The majority of data, at companies large and small, exists in old hard-to-get-to file formats or technologies. If a company has been around for at least 20 years, they may have applications on mainframes, or built on older databases that don’t adhere to modern DBMS standards, or data that exists essentially as flat files, such as in COBOL formats.  But getting that data out of older systems and into new, modern systems that utilize these latest technologies is a very hard problem which software vendors typically gloss over.

If an ERP or CRM vendor tells you “migrating your data to our new app. is a cinch, no problem at all,” then you know somebody’s lying.

Most applications these days are built on modern databases that are self-contained wonders. They have things like tables, fields, relationships between these tables and fields, passwords, programming, indexes, metadata, all wrapped in one nice package.

Most legacy systems use older data storage technologies such as VSAM, ISAM or COBOL which have no indexes, metadata, nor relationships, just long rows of data, with rudimentary attempts to indicate what each section of data means, when they were written, etc.

Converting legacy data to data that is neatly placed in rows and columns and in a format that can be utilized by one of the new applications is not something one of the modern SOA vendors can do, and requires a traditional data integration or ETL (Extract Transform and Load) tool to perform.  It’s not sexy or modern, but it’s something countless organizations face every day.

So before going out and buying the latest SOA-compliant whiz-bang application, you need to really consider how you’re going to get all your valuable customer and product data from those old hard-to-get-to systems into your beautiful, shiny new application.