There are times when your software applications have outgrown their environment and need to be moved to a new technology infrastructure. If these applications are primary enterprise applications, then decisions made about the new infrastructure and how your applications are migrated to it can have far reaching implications for the financial or commercial operations of your organization.

Because change means risk, how much change to incorporate into a systems migration effort is a big question to be answered when moving to a new infrastructure. Therefore, some functions or features of the current environment may be retained during a migration to limit the destabilization of the current application set. So, there is typically a tradeoff between new, desirable functionality and destabilization risk. Some examples of basic tradeoff questions to be addressed during a migration exercise include:

• Should the entire application set in the current environment be migrated or should only a portion of it be migrated with logical links between the old and new environments?
• Should the current application architecture be ported to the new environment or should a new architecture be adopted to take advantage of features or functions available in the new environment?
• Should user interfaces be updated to change the "look and feel" of user interactions or should the current familiar interfaces be retained?
• Should some longstanding application deficiencies be corrected as part of the migration effort or should they be retained so the scope of the migration effort can be controlled?
• Should the entire target application set in the current environment be migrated at the same time ("big bang") or should current applications be migrated over multiple project phases ("staged migration")?
• Should new functionality be added to the application set being migrated or should the migration effort only include existing functionality?

BHMI can help you answer these tradeoff questions. And, given BHMI's decades of experience and expertise in developing primary enterprise applications and conducting systems integration efforts, BHMI can migrate your applications to a new environment efficiently, effectively, and at low risk. You can rejuvenate your existing applications with new capabilities that help maintain their technical edge. After all, your primary software is important – let BHMI keep it that way.