SOA Helps Enterprises Give New Life to Legacy Applications

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - July 12, 2007) - IT organizations are turning to SOA and web services to preserve their substantial investments in mainframe applications, according to a new benchmark report from Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS).

The report, "Modernizing Legacy Applications: Maximizing the Investment," is based on a survey of more than 300 organizations worldwide. Over 90% of companies who participated in the study said that modernization of legacy applications is a long-term, strategic initiative.

"IT is under intense pressure from business units to deliver applications that provide new ways to look at old processes and data," said Perry Donham, Aberdeen's director for enterprise integration research, and the report's author. "We found that the companies that are keeping up with these demands while lowering their overall costs for maintaining legacy applications are leaving the applications in place and building services-based interfaces on top of the underlying packages and data."

The survey found that:

--  Companies that are deploying services layers on the mainframe in order
    to expose legacy packages see a 60% decrease in the cost of legacy
    application maintenance versus an average 30% decrease from other
    approaches; and
--  Agility, not cost, is the driving factor by a factor of two to one for
    best-in-class organizations that are working on legacy modernization
    projects.
    

"Modernizing Legacy Applications: Maximizing the Investment" is made available at no charge thanks in part to the following report underwriters: IBM, Infinite Software, Micro Focus, and Relativity Technologies.

To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=4099

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company

Aberdeen is a leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to Aberdeen™ for insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information - Opportunity - Insight - Engagement - Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.

© 2007 Aberdeen Group, Inc., a Harte-Hanks Company
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Boston, Massachusetts  02110-3112
Telephone: (617)723-7890
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Contact Information: Media Contact: Perry Donham Aberdeen Harte-Hanks (617) 854-5315 perry.donham@aberdeen.com