Case Study:

A new lease of life

1 December 2006

When DELA, the largest funeral insurance company in the Netherlands, realised that it was losing money daily on its old, slow mainframe, it called in Sogeti who, with the assistance of its migration partners MigrationWare and Micro Focus, offered DELA the solution to its dilemma.

In addition to DELA's high operational costs of 3.7m annually, covering mainframe lease, licences, maintenance and systems management, an important motivation for the migration was that its business applications had been developed in IDEAL, an 'end-of-life' environment that did not fit with new architectures and technologies.

Based on the cost benefits and the shorter return on investment, DELA chose to convert to the Microsoft Windows platform and use Micro Focus Cobol technology for its connectivity and development environment.

"DELA felt the conversion of 2,700 IDEAL programs was a high-risk project because of the many technological changes," says Sogeti project manager Norbert Mimpen. "To take away this important barrier, an extended proof of concept phase was introduced to provide DELA with the security of a successful conversion." The proof of concept entailed converting a representative portion of the source to the target environment to prove that the conversion could be done. The Micro Focus Cobol technology on Windows provided a powerful conversion testing environment with excellent traceability and debugging facilities.

The start point was to run a baseline test using the original DB2 database containing test data on the mainframe. All screens and reports were captured, all file inputs and outputs retained and together with the before and after snapshots of the DB2 database, all were converted to the target database on the Windows platform. Only when the data conversion was successfully completed did the target environment testing begin in earnest.

The next step was to perform parallel tests and comparisons on all aspects of the system. This involved screens, reports, files and database snapshots. Whenever deviations occurred analysis was done to determine the cause and, when necessary, bugs which had occurred due to the conversion were fixed before re-running the test.

The mainframe was moved out of the DELA building within two weeks of the migrated applications going live. "Planning had been very optimistic due to the pressure of the existing lease contract expiring and the prospect of cost savings," says Mimpen. "As a result, actual cost savings kicked in two months later than expected due to the project taking longer than planned."

As with all migrations a number of lessons were learned along the way. He comments: "When you are dealing with a number of applications built by different teams, these contain different types of problems. Every application that is to be migrated should be involved in the initial proving phase."

Anything can go wrong, as all technology has been changed due to the migration. "Our advice always is to do a complete test and pay careful attention to the test preparation. In the DELA scenario no test scripts were initially available." A good tip, he says, is to use test tools like a record-playback facility.

The results included identical functionality to the original system, and almost identical look and feel with no additional user training needed. The migrated systems provided better performance than the original mainframe systems and although additional code was introduced, the program structure and maintainability remained unchanged.

Joao De Oliveira, sales director at MigrationWare, said that DELA's decision to build a target environment around the key Micro Focus and Microsoft technologies, enabled MigrationWare to play a significant role in the project. The Micro Focus environment on Windows increased developer productivity, which formed the beginning of significant cost savings.

"This was a mega job and had to be done within record time," says Mimpen. "Thanks to the proven Mikado method and best-in-class tooling ? along with partners like MigrationWare and Micro Focus ? we managed to successfully complete this migration project and to deliver the benefits that the client expected."