Why Migrate to OpenFusion CORBA?
Many major CORBA middleware users in industries such as telecommunications, defense, aerospace and finance, have already benefited in both economic and technical terms from a migration away from commercial ORB implementations to open-source technology. As the market has matured and a number of the leading vendors have defocused from CORBA, high-quality open-source ORBs offer an increasingly compelling alternative to proprietary ORB implementations. In the current business climate adopting open-source CORBA middleware, such as PrismTech’s OpenFusion TAO and OpenFusion JacORB implementations, provides significant commercial and technical benefits to users including:
CORBA Migration - Lower total cost-of-ownership
This is achieved by eliminating license costs for both development and deployment. Instead pay a single annual fee, which is determined by total annual requirements. With open-source products such as OpenFusion TAO and OpenFusion JacORB there are also no upgrade license fees.
CORBA Migration - Security of supply
With the traditional CORBA vendors moving away from CORBA and the size of their ORB development teams shrinking it is not clear that in the future their products will routinely be made available on the most up-to-date operating systems/compiler versions, whether they will continue to support older releases &/or platforms, or whether they may even withdraw some products.
CORBA Migration - On-going product evolution
Unlike some of the traditional vendors who view their CORBA products as a "cash-cow" part of their business PrismTech continues to invest heavily in CORBA R&D. PrismTech's OpenFusion open-source ORBs also benefit from the combined development efforts and innovation of an entire community of engineers with support from a wide range of companies committed to the on-going development of the technology.
What are OpenFusion CORBA Migration Services?
PrismTech’s OpenFusion Migration Services range from assessments, both cost saving and technical, through to complete outsourced application migrations. They typically include migrations from proprietary CORBA ORBs such as Visibroker and Orbix to OpenFusion TAO and OpenFusion JacORB.
What is a Migration Assessment?
As part of a migration assessment one of PrismTech’s expert CORBA consultants will carry out a thorough review of your CORBA application in order to provide a roadmap outlining any areas of technical risk, resources, time and costs required for you to successfully migrate to OpenFusion CORBA. Although the assessment provides intrinsic value, the overall exercise also instills confidence that a complete migration of the target CORBA application infrastructure to PrismTech’s open-source ORB technology will be successful by assuring technical feasibility, and an acceptable level of quality and cost-effectiveness.
A normal first step that can be carried out before the migration assessment, is for PrismTech's consulting services team to quickly assess your existing CORBA environment and provide an estimation of the associated cost savings and other benefits that can be achieved before considering a migration.
Major candidates for migration and cost saving assessments include:
- Migration from Visibroker Java ORB to OpenFusion JacORB
- Migration from Visibroker C++ ORB to OpenFusion TAO
- Migration from Orbix Java ORB to OpenFusion JacORB
- Migration from Orbix C++ ORB to OpenFusion TAO
A migration assessment by one of PrismTech’s expert consultants is the first major step in any migration project. It helps mitigate risk and identifies the most efficient strategy for migrating to OpenFusion CORBA. When you have a clear roadmap on what must be done and what resources will be required then you can be confident that your migration project will be successful. If you leverage PrismTech’s CORBA experts to migrate your application for you then you can be sure that they will complete the job with maximum efficiency and minimal disruption to your business operations.
Pre-requisites
Key to a producing successful migration assessment is having access to the development staff responsible for development and deployment of the target application. Having these individuals involved at the planning phase of the migration and also in the later stages of the project is critical. The customer stakeholders that are key to the migration assessment are:
- Project Czar – this is the person at the client who has the high level view of the project goals and objectives. This person has ultimate sign off authority at the client.
- Project Lead – this is person with direct contact with PrismTech’s consulting team, managing activities at the client such as ensuring the timely delivery of information required by the project.
- Technical Team – these people can provide the detailed technical information about the customer’s application required for the migration project. Access to these people will normally be via Project Lead.
Depending on access the customer’s technical team, application source code, design artifacts or specific security or confidentiality requirements, the migration assessment typically takes three to five days and can be carried out at either a customer’s premises or at one of PrismTech’s world wide development centers.
Summary: OpenFusion CORBA Migration Services
PrismTech’s expert CORBA consultants have helped many customers reap the benefits of open-source CORBA technology and successfully migrate from their existing proprietary ORB implementations to a more cost effective solution such as OpenFusion TAO or OpenFusion JacORB.
Our consultants can help you quickly determine the potential cost savings that can be achieved by migrating. They also help you to assess the scope, technical risk, resources and costs associated with a migration project.
By providing a transfer of knowledge to the customer’s technical team or alternatively by outsourcing the implementation of the migration project to our CORBA consultants, PrismTech can ensure the most efficient and cost-effective route for our customers to leverage the technical and commercial benefits of OpenFusion CORBA.
