Legacy in the Cloud

Last week saw the launch of a new UK-based international company CIMTrek. For those of you who are Process buffs the name of the CEO of this new venture is synonymous with the development of process development – Jon Pyke. I had a briefing with Jon to find out what this new company was all about.

Jon Pyke told me “Cloud computing is not a new technology or architecture or methodology. But it is a new “delivery model” where all computing and networking resources are delivered as “services” that are elastic (use as much or as little as you need at any given time), massively scalable, and are available on-demand with self-service, pay-as-you-go variable cost subscriptions. While this is an attractive model many organisations are holding back on a migration path over concerns about legacy applications. CIMTrek removes that barrier by providing the tools to discovering what applications your organisation has and what can be migrated. Users can then define which apps they want and then in one simple click can migrate all identified applications.”

The first legacy applications that CIMTrek is aimed are Lotus Notes, which still has 160 million users worldwide (over 6,000,000 users just in the UK). So what does the product do? In the first stage, CIMTrek mines and drills into your Notes systems and identifies all the Notes applications that you have. Once this has happened, CIMTrek does an analysis of each application to see how easy it will be to convert and then it builds a registry of your Notes applications and converts them into common XML-based format. The last is to tell CIMTrek what you want to convert the Lotus Notes application into.

Ok but what else is different? CIMTrek has developed the tools that can migrate legacy applications to cloud platforms. The company also provides cloud platforms that mirror closely the way existing applications work. You pay by subscription based on the number of users having signed up for a fixed period of up to a quarter for the use of the product over the web. A subscription payment base is also used for the migration and discovery capability and this is over a 3 month period.

I asked Jon if CIMTrek had any customers yet. The answer was currently no but they were being asked to do a number of proofs of concept. Jon told me that they are planning a first public airing of the product and service at the end of September – so watch this space.

CIMTrek has already set up distribution outside on the UK in Australia and Benelux and has partnered with Cloud Harbour to support the USA.

This is an interesting new entrant into the Cloud debate as it is tackling the problem of legacy applications and providing a means of an organisation moving eventually all it computing requirements to the cloud.