Case Study:
Enhanced agility
1 September 2006
When a leading Japanese financial services group needed to move its applications away from the legacy technology on which they were built, Zensar Technologies was able to deliver a smooth migration to the Microsoft .NET Framework.
The customer has a long-established national and international presence in the financial services industry, focusing mainly on non-life insurance services.
Having built its existing system on legacy technologies, the company worked with Hitachi Cobol, virtual storage access method (VSAM) and queued sequential access method (QSAM) data processing, including both online and batch processing.
Batch jobs are executed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to collate all transactional data and generate various reports whereas the online element allows the entry of key customer insurance data via green terminals.
The customer wanted more flexibility and improved performance while enabling easy maintenance and enhancement. The firm is an end customer of Zensar's partner, a leading Japanese solution integrator that provides end-to-end solutions for the financial services and asset management industries. Offering consulting and knowledge services, as well as systems solution services, the partner company devises and builds customised solutions for clients.
Having implemented one of these solutions, which were built using a legacy system, the customer wanted to migrate them to the latest technologies. Zensar was the logical choice.
The project had three key goals. First, to refine existing business functionalities and enhance systems performance. Secondly, it was essential that the solution enabled a low total cost of ownership to compensate for the cost of the migration ? this would be achieved through low ongoing maintenance costs for the migrated application. Thirdly, by automating and outsourcing the migration process, the solution would be made extremely cost-effective.
Zensar was to develop the customer's existing system in .NET using ASP.NET 1.1, C#, SQL Server 2000 database and IIS Web server. Zensar's innovative Solution Blue Print (SBP) Framework was used to reengineer the Hitachi Cobol application to the .NET Framework.
Using automated tools, Zensar analysed the company's requirements and input them into the SBP Framework. Visual models were created, and the business logic was extracted out of the requirements and then embedded within the models. Finally, the .NET code was generated automatically using SBP, which formed part of the application code. The pilot project saw the reengineering of around 150,000 lines of code of the existing application. Batch programs, as well as online programs were migrated from Hitachi Cobol, VSAM and QSAM to ASP.NET and C#, and SQL Server 2000. Deliverables included a source system analysis document; a target system design document; a generated target system code; UT/IT/ST test plans, test cases and test results; and UAT test results.
Visual models were created using the SBP Framework. These included a business process model; use case diagrams; class diagrams; sequence diagrams; the automatic generation of .NET-class code and database schema, and a user interface, which was developed manually.
The application was developed using model view controller (MVC) architecture, with the target application including ASPX pages using ASP.NET for the presentation layer, developed in C#. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) provided a style sheet to ensure global accessibility of data in the required format in a browser. The business logic layer was developed using C# and deployed on COM+ server, and the target system used built-in services provided by COM+ server. A data access application block was used as the data access layer and was written in C#.
The operating system is Microsoft Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, and the solution has IIS 6.0 application and Web servers. The database is SQL Server 2000, while Visual Studio .NET 2003 (Enterprise Architect) provides the integrated development environment. Software tools include Visual Studio .NET, Enterprise Architect, SQL Server 2000, HTML and JavaScript.
Several challenges were faced during the project. The source code included a lot of variables, formed from the abbreviation of Japanese business terms ? extracting the meaning of some of these took some time. In addition, the Zensar team needed to understand the complex business logic that caters to the Japanese insurance market.
Several key benefits resulted from the migration. By semi-automating the forward engineering from unified modelling language to .NET, the migration was faster then with a conventional development process. Platform-agnostic modelling was done on a framework-supporting deployment architecture, and the visual modelling was process-driven.
The .NET target system enabled better performance than the legacy system for the identified pilot project. Maintenance and enhancements are now much easier, due to an object-oriented and modular system design.
A spokesman for the customer says: "We have developed a very good relationship with Zensar Technologies, and are impressed by their experience, the quality they deliver, and their collaboration model with us. We would like to continue working with them in the Japanese legacy migration market."