They need to understand the architecture and structure of their existing systems to provide unified services to their customers. Very often, this requires substantial enhancements to their legacy systems. Other types of ongoing maintenance requirements include changes in the business scenario. For instance account numbers could change or the banks may decide to integrate all the accounting information of all aspects of the customers' portfolio into a single account. This again requires changing the legacy systems.
Business requirements keep changing, and that drives the maintenance requirements.
Automated maintenance solutions, which is what we provide, is a big windfall for these companies, which were traditionally using labor intensive methods for maintaining legacy systems. Today large companies cannot afford to do maintenance in the traditional way, not only for Year 2000 but also for their ongoing operations. On top of that, other uses include, for instance, applications to deal with the unified European currency, reengineering for web enablement and for data warehousing. Companies realize that all their data reside on the mainframe, and if they want access to legacy data through the Internet, or for e-commerce, then they need to understand how the data is structured, how to access it, what the business rules are. Yes, I agree with that.