Migration and Porting provide the solution for platform rationalisation in the form of either upgrades or complete switching over to a new language/database/platform. In migration, application logic is not changed. However, it may trigger off changing system calls, I/O statements, peripheral handling mechanisms, etc. Migration projects are more technical in nature and do not require much involvement of business users. An example of a migration project will be a migration from IMS (hierarchical database from IBM) to DB2 (relational database from IBM). In a migration approach, the primary focus will be on the database access logic rather than the entire application logic in most cases.

The key thing in migration is impact assessment and degree of process automation. Depending on the findings of the Assessment Study a combination of migration and re-engineering may be required.

NIIT emphasises on the maximisation of tool usage. However the degree of automation that is achieved, depends on various factors such as:

• Source and target data stores
• Mapping logic for source and target language contracts
• Source and Target operating systems

NIIT has a legacy code mining framework called "Insight" which helps in legacy code assessment study, impact analysis, code mining, business rule extraction and migration. This is a rule-based framework with language parsers and tools that automate the above activities for projects involving COBOL, RPG/400, CL/400, PL/1. IBM Assembler and JCL. The framework is extensible and designed for the addition of languages.