HP, Oracle and Intel have launched a joint initiative to help corporate customers move legacy applications off mainframes and onto x86-based reference architecture.

The Application Modernisation Initiative was introduced today at the Oracle OpenWorld show in San Francisco. It features HP Integrity servers running on Intel Itanium processors, which have been pre-tested with HP's virtual server environment and the Oracle Grid Computing Platform. The initiative is designed to prepare the ground for service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployment, and gives firms access to a shared pool of the three companies’ consultants and support staff.

Paul Evans, worldwide director of application modernisation services at HP, estimates that some companies are spending 70 percent of their IT budget on maintaining legacy mainframe applications written in programming languages few people now understand. "The guys coming out of college don't know how to run an IBM mainframe with Cobol running CIX and you just can't modernise these applications easily. This is causing CIOs a lot of worry," he said.

John Pickett, worldwide manager of HP's mainframe alternative program, highlighted the example of a large insurance company that he said recently saved $22m in maintenance costs over a four-year period by moving a Cobol application with 2,000 database tables over to a HP Superdome server running Oracle 10G in a rack cluster.

"It's not only the cost savings but also a third faster performance. By pre-testing on virtual servers we can also cut deployment time in half depending on the complexity of the migration," Pickett added.

Evans denied that the new initiative advocates a rip and replace approach to existing systems. He argued that the whole intention of the SOA model is to modularise software so it can be re-used by different applications.

Tom Kurcharvy, an analyst at research specialist Ovum Summit, said that few companies would want to switch all of their applications from a mainframe immediately, preferring to gradually phase-out legacy systems.

"Replacements often come in as ‘surround the mainframe’ implementations, where the Unix system gradually offloads workloads such as decision support from the mainframe, while the mainframe continues to be used for core OLTP [online transaction processing] and perhaps batch applications," Kurcharvy said. " Sometimes the mainframe is filled with other workloads, and sometimes more and more workloads are pulled off until the plug can be pulled."