A common question faced by any organization looking to modernize their mainframe application ecosystem is, “what do we do with assembler?” Whether it’s a few remaining programs performing low-level hardware manipulation, or tens of thousands of programs containing complex business logic - assembler must be addressed in order to successfully transition to the target environment.
Assembler programs are dependent on the underlying hardware architecture, and unlike many common languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN and PL/I - are not supported on distributed hardware platforms. Hardware performance gains and increased efficiency in the previously mentioned language compilers has seen the requirement for (and popularity of) assembler drop significantly in recent years. This slow demise in usage has also contributed to the shortage of skilled resources – a key driver of any mainframe modernization initiative.
Modern Systems have been migrating mainframe workloads for over two decades, and have significant experience assessing and migrating assembler programs to modern, distributed languages. The Modern Systems Assembler Modernization Factory provides the ability to migrate assembler programs to languages such as COBOL, Java or C#.