27 October 2008

IFN Finance is a subsidiary of ABN Amro, and focuses primarily on financing working capital. This includes such aspects as debt financing and stocks financing.

“These activities rely heavily on information systems that we have developed ourselves, such as our Basis Factoring System (BFS),” says Marcel den Outer, project leader in IFN Finance’s IT department. “The BFS has always run on Unisys A-series mainframes, and we wrote the system in the early 1990s with the aid of Unisys Linc.”

The BFS is a crucial business application for IFN Finance. “It supports all major business processes in our organisation, and we faced a number of problems at the same time,” says den Outer. But the mainframe and its associated infrastructure were too expensive, especially in terms of licences and maintenance. In addition, the closed system of the mainframe made the company too dependent on one supplier. “We preferred to be able to work with a more open system environment, which would also make us more flexible,” says den Outer.

Having worked with Burroughs mainframes for 15 years, IFN decided to migrate to Asysco Migration Technology (AMT) LION on the Windows platform. The company’s IT department carefully examined how Asysco migrates applications like the BFS, and found that almost all the process could be done automatically. It drew up a business case including answers to all of its questions, and organised a proof of concept.

“We migrated the BFS in a lab environment,” says den Outer. “To our amazement, 98-99 per cent of this migration was automatic. The issues that finally occurred were simple to resolve by small modifications to the software.”

To create the high availability of a mainframe on a Windows platform, IFN built in extra redundancy by using a double network, double disk controllers, a Raid5 disk system and a cluster server.

IFN Finance has achieved the financial savings it hoped for with the migration without problems, and has realised its strategic objectives. “Using AMT-LION is not an objective for us,” says den Outer. “It’s a means to an end. IFN Finance has invested millions in the BFS application and this functionality is of vital importance to us. By using AMT-LION, we can optimally protect our investment in BFS. We will be able to continue using BFS for years in an IT environment that is many times more appealing from a cost point of view than a mainframe. Because we now work with open systems, we are also able to support changes in our business processes quickly and easily with ICT.”

This article first appeared in the 2008 edition of the Finance on Windows Partner Guide.

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