In 2007, Software AG commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact (TEI) and potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by maintaining implementations of Adabas and Natural compared with replacing these systems with other databases and languages (or packaged applications). Adabas is Software AG's transactional database management system (DBMS). Natural is a programming language and application development and deployment environment that has been in use by enterprises around the world since the 1980s. This study illustrates the financial implications of maintaining an organization's Adabas and Natural capabilities compared with a "rip and replace" scenario.

In conducting in-depth interviews with four existing Software AG customers, Forrester found that these companies confronted the decision to replace Adabas and Natural with other database platforms and programming languages (or outsourcing). In all cases, these customers have extensive, critical applications that have been written in Natural and are fed with data from Adabas. Three of the customers actually began large replacement projects; two of the companies ceased replacement efforts in the face of cost and schedule overruns, while another customer was in the midst of reevaluation at the time of the study. The Software AG customers interviewed for this study each described shifts in strategy away from systems enhancement for its own sake toward building business value by capitalizing on the stable Adabas and Natural environment with its continuously growing functionality.