MMA forms APAC arm in Singapore

1 March 2006

The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) has launched its Asia Pacific arm, which will be headquartered in Singapore.

Financial services ? especially the insurance sector ? is an important area of focus for the MMA as the industry warms to the savings and agility they can make by moving away from their legacy systems.

The alliance, which is represented by a community of software vendors and service providers, aims to help mainframe customers overcome the challenges posed by owning and maintaining legacy application environments.

Many organisations are facing pressure to reduce the budgets required to maintain mainframes. Using Windows Server 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework, the MMA offers customers the information they need to achieve scalability, reliability, and security, while delivering much greater organisational agility and significantly lowering overall IT costs.

In addition to providing the network which allows members to collaborate and make mainframe migrations easier and more efficient, the MMA has a community Web site aimed at sharing best practices and providing resources to customers migrating from their mainframe environments to the Microsoft Windows Server platform.

Chris Sharp, general manager of server and tools at Microsoft Asia Pacific, said: "We are seeing strong customer interest in moving off the mainframe to Windows Server, so the setting up of the Asia Pacific arm of the Mainframe Migration Alliance could not have come at a better time for these customers.

"Customers who migrate from mainframes to the Windows server will realise significant benefits."