In the past 40 years, mainframe applications have continued to grow, and they keep delivering value in highly complex and mission critical application environments. There would be no reason to question this state of affairs – if it weren’t for the issue of companies gradually losing the core knowledge in software developed many years ago. This knowledge is headed for retirement, and junior staff with knowledge in ASSEMBLER, COBOL, IMS, CICS, VSE, Z/OS, etc., is very hard to find. Evaluating the best strategy (or combination of strategies) is non-trivial, and involves understanding the business case, schedule targets, resources available, residual values in the legacy assets, technical details of the application implementations and deployments. Following an analysis of your legacy application using B+B’s APM “StART” (Software Strategy Analysis and Reporting Tool), you are able to clearly and verifiably identify the right strategy for each of your applications.