Jeffrey L. Walker founded TenFold in 1993. From TenFold’s inception to October 1996, Mr. Walker was Chairman, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Technology Officer. Before founding TenFold, Mr. Walker was an independent consultant from 1991 to 1993. From 1985 to 1991, Mr. Walker held several management positions at Oracle Corporation, including Executive Vice President and General Manager Applications Division, Chief Financial Officer (1987 to 1991), and Senior Vice President of Marketing (1986). Mr. Walker was the designer of Oracle’s applications products and founder of Oracle’s Applications Division.

Before joining Oracle, Mr. Walker founded and was Chief Executive Officer of Walker Interactive Products, an applications software company, from 1980 to 1985. Mr. Walker was the designer of Walker’s products. Prior to Walker Interactive, Mr. Walker was the founder CEO and sole proprietor of Jeffrey L. Walker & Company, a software and applications consulting company. Mr. Walker holds a BA in mathematics from Brown University. TenFold’s technology.

Presentation
BridgeBack ­ a Low-Risk, Programming-Free Legacy-to-SOA Migration Strategy
Most companies have significant investments in legacy systems and have continuing requests for changes to those systems as business stakeholders want systems to keep pace with business and strategic direction changes. Since the cost of legacy-system maintenance is typically exorbitant, companies need to replace major legacy systems to meet business stakeholder needs and reduce maintenance costs.

Replacing major legacy systems is traditionally very high risk because:

Difficult, costly, long projects are required to design and build new applications which bring with them the risk of applications development schedule and budget delays. Data conversion, data cleansing, and end-user training is challenging.

Turning off a legacy system on Sunday night and shifting to the new system Monday, and praying for success is a very high risk strategy.

TenFold is pursuing a strategy of helping its customers who are moving to SOA replace legacy-systems with small, low-risk steps:

• Short (few month) projects to redesign and rebuild a high-impact portion of a legacy system
• Data conversion, data cleansing, and end-user training to support a portion of the legacy system
• Automated, programming-free database synchronization called BridgeBack to keep the legacy system running and avoid any legacy system change
• Rapid delivery of significant, replacement-system benefits without appreciable risk
• Rapid delivery of ROI that delivers quick victories for IT and dramatic new-system benefits to business stakeholders
• Module by module replacement of the legacy application with SOA service-rich replacement modules

TenFold and its founders are business applications specialists and are pioneering a model-driven approach that exploits model-driven metadata to build SOA-compliant applications and specify legacy-system connections without programming. A model-driven approach offers a dramatic improvement in applications development time and significantly reduces cost of development as it replaces the traditional requirements-design-develop (program or generate)-compile-deploy methodology with describe-render-publish approach to building services and service-oriented applications.

Multiple TenFold customers have used the approach discussed in this presentation to safely replace legacy systems and deliver business benefits in months rather than years.

return to program