Over the past several years, Sirius Modernization Solutions Architect Michael T. Prinster has spoken with executives, managers and developers at dozens of organizations. And he’s heard the same story time and time again: “We have this green-screen application that has worked well for us for years, and now we have to replace it with a Web application (or wireless handheld application, or Web services, or service oriented architecture) that does the same thing.”

The fundamental problem with statements like this is the phrase, “we have to replace it.” Many organizations simply do not know that there are realistic options available that will let them leverage the applications and business logic that have been running their businesses for all these years. And they can be efficiently and seamlessly integrated to support wireless handheld applications, Web services—and yes, even a service oriented architecture.

Contrary to what you might have read in that last white paper or trade journal, service oriented architecture, or SOA, is not so much a suite of products as an architectural approach. With SOA, the fundamental goal is to carve out reusable packages of business functionality and expose them as services, and then to compose these services to create applications that meet the needs of the business.

Mike Prinster has written an article in which he presents some options for leveraging legacy RPG and COBOL business logic to create services, and discusses how to integrate these legacy services into a service oriented architecture.