Although grid technologies have been embraced by academia and industry as a viable solution to build integrated systems out of heterogeneous resources, a number of challenges still hamper their widespread acceptance and use. One particular challenge has proven difficult to overcome: the transition of legacy code into grid environments. The ability to adapt legacy applications to benefit from grid resources is vital to the success of grid technologies, since re-writing them is not a practical solution in many settings. Financial institutions are perhaps the most clear case, since they use complex, sensitive and resource-demanding software that can greatly benefit from grid technologies but cannot afford to be significantly re-written. This paper describes the efforts conducted to modify legacy financial applications to be executed under a commercial grid middleware named Sparsi Maestro. We describe the steps involved in the transition of a legacy application into the grid environment and present two examples of actual financial applications that have undergone that process. © 2011 ACM. 3945ACM SIGARCH,IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS)Amdahl, G., Validity of the single-processor approach to achieving large scale computing capabilities (1967) AFIPS Conference, pp. 483-485Baduel, L., Baude, F., Caromel, D., Contes, A., Huet, F., Morel, M., Quilici, R., Programming, deploying, composing, for the grid (2006) Grid Computing: Software Environments and Tools, , Springer LondonChandra, R., Dagum, L., Kohr, D., Maydan, D., Mcdonald, J., Menon, R., (2001) Parallel Programming in OpenMP, , Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USAChien, A., Calder, B., Elbert, S., Bhatia, K., Entropia: Architecture, performance of an enterprise desktop grid system (2003) Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 63 (5)Childers, L., Disz, T., Olson, R., Papka, M.E., Stevens, R., Udeshi, T., Access grid: Immersive group-to-group collaborative visualization Proceedings of the Fourth International Immersive Projection Technology Workshop, , June 19-20Delaitre, T., Kiss, T., Goyeneche, A., Terstyanszky, G., Winter, S., Kacsuk, P., GEMLCA: Running legacy code applications as Grid services (2005) Journal of Grid Computing, 3 (1-2), pp. 75-90. , DOI 10.1007/s10723-005-9002-8Foster, I., Globus toolkit version 4: Software for service-oriented systems (2006) Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 21 (4)Ho, Q., Ong, Y., Cai, W., Gridifying aerodynamic design problem using GridRPC Grid and Cooperative Computing(Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3032, pp. 83-90. , Springer Berlin / HeidelbergKommineni, J., Abramson, D., GriddLeS enhancements and building virtual applications for the GRID with legacy components (2005) Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3470, pp. 961-971. , Advances in Grid Computing - EGC 2005: European Grid Conference, Revised Selected PapersMateos, C., Zunino, A., Campo, M., A survey on approaches to gridification (2008) Software - Practice and Experience, (38)Natrajan, A., Humphrey, M.A., Grimshaw, A.S., The legion support for advanced parameter space studies on a grid (2002) Future Generation Computer Systems, 18 (8)Project, B.B.J., (2011) Reliable Multicasting with the Jgroups Toolkit, , http://www.jgroups.org/manual/, SeptemberSnir, M., Otto, S., Huss-Lederman, S., Walker, D., Dongarra, J., (1998) MPI - The Complete Reference, Volume 1: The MPI Core, , MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2nd. (revised) editionSynapse, D., (2010) Gridserver: High Performance Application Infrastructure for Your Business Critical Applications, , http://www.datasynapse.com/gridserver, MayThain, D., Tanenbaum, T., Livny, M., Condor and the grid (2003) Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, , John Wiley & SonsVadhiyar, S., Dongarra, J., Grads gridification of numeric applications based on globus and mpi (2005) Self Adaptability in Grid Computing. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 17 (2-4). , Special Issue on Grid PerformanceWang, B., Xu, Z., Xu, C., Yin, Y., Ding, W., Yu, H., A study of gridifying scientific computing legacy codes (2004) Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 3251, pp. 404-412Willard, C.G., (2010) Univa UD's Strategy for Subduing the Complex Software Monster, , http://www.univaud.com/about/resources/files/wp-tabor-research.pdf, May