Branbantia gets set up for the future

26 January 2009

Brabantia has succeeded in cutting costs and simplifying its back-up procedure from the mainframe migration

Brabantia is an international own brand retailer as well as an innovative household product manufacturer. The company primarily sells through its dealers and other retailers, but also has a catalogue order service and an online shop selling all of its product line directly to consumers.

Brabantia was experiencing high costs of application development on its existing mainframe architecture, and was also having to spend a lot of money on the necessary mainframe hardware. “Of course, one of the biggest problems in working with a mainframe is the cost,” says Robert Borst, ICT manager for Brabantia in Waalre, the Netherlands. “It’s not just the hardware that’s expensive - the tools that we used to use to develop tailor-made applications also cost a lot of money.

Brabantia turned to Microsoft partner Asysco for help. Using Asysco’s AMT-Lion migration technology, Brabantia has migrated four large mainframe applications to the Windows platform. “Asysco had developed an interesting tool within AMT-Lion for mainframe users who wanted to reduce development costs,” says Borst.

With the new tool the mainframe is no longer involved. In fact, coding is generated on the Windows platform and can then be implemented on a Windows Server. In addition to this, Asysco has also developed a tool that enables Lion applications to combine the benefits of the mainframe and Windows. In other words, they are robust with very high availability but are also inexpensive and flexible. A major difference between both tools is that the latter no longer uses the ‘model file’ derived from the mainframe. Moreover, both tools make it possible to provide an application with a Web interface. This allows mobile workers, partners or suppliers remote access to the applications.

Brabantia was also looking to move to a service provider more focussed on smaller businesses. “We took a good look at Asysco,” says Borst. “The company has been around for thirty years and has a great deal of knowledge in this market segment. When you add to that the benefits offered by AMT-Lion, and the fact that our existing supplier focussed its attention on its larger customers, the decision was quickly made.”

The migration was carefully planned. “We did this in different stages,” says Borst. “We used Lion to migrate from the mainframe to Windows. This gave us maximum control and the biggest chance of a successful migration. It also enabled us to return to the mainframe if it went wrong. For the migration we used the services of Asysco and their migration script. This script converted the existing applications and the business logic incorporated in them to AMT-Lion code. After running the script, it took us about a month to get everything working well.”

Functionally, the new applications are the same as the old mainframe applications but, thanks to

AMT-Lion, they can now be used in a Windows environment. “Because we’ve installed a cluster of Windows systems, the entire system environment is just as reliable as the mainframe used to be,” says Borst

“The benefits of Brabantia’s migration to AMT-Lion are great,” says Borst. “First of all, we no longer have to deal with the high cost of the mainframe hardware. We’ve been able to achieve an estimated saving of eighty per cent on that point alone. We’ve also been able to drastically simplify the back-up procedure, which has reduced costs considerably. Because we now have fewer different environments, management costs have also dropped.”

However, according to Borst, it’s not just about money: “We now have a much more flexible ICT environment. For example, real-time communication between applications is now possible, whereas the mainframe only allowed batch communications. Moreover, thanks to AMT-Lion, we can have Web interfaces for all our important business systems that can be accessed by mobile employees or external parties. When you also consider that the availability of these information systems is comparable with our old mainframe environment, you can clearly see that we are a satisfied user of Asysco’s Lion technology.”

The next step is server virtualisation, in which AMT-Lion will again play a major role.