The software industry has evolved to tackle new approaches aligned with the Internet, object-orientation, distributed components and new platforms. However, the majority of the large information systems running today in many organizations were developed many years ago with technologies that are now obsolete. These old systems, known as legacy systems, include software, hardware, business processes and organizational strategies and policies. Many are still business-critical and their complete replacement is dangerous and their maintenance is increasingly expensive. The amount of code in legacy systems is immense; there are billions upon billions of lines of code in existence that must be maintained.
The demand for modernization of legacy systems created the need for new architectural frameworks for information integration and tool interoperation that allow managing new platform technologies, design techniques and processes. The Object Management Group (OMG) adopted the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) that is an evolving conceptual architecture aligned with this demand.
Beyond interoperability reasons, there are other benefits to using MDA such as improving productivity, process quality and maintenance costs. MDA itself is not a technology specification, but it represents an evolving plan to achieve cohesive model-driven technology specifications.