Case Study:

Quick shift for pre-press system

1 September 2006

Express Newspapers' stable of publications includes the Daily Express and Sunday Express, as well as the Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday. Express Newspapers selected migration specialist MSS International to port its existing applications to a commodity server using Micro Focus Studio and Server, thereby eliminating mainframe costs of ?830,000, improving system performance and freeing up IT staff to focus on other projects.

"The biggest decision that we had to make was related to the Pre-Press Control System," says Simon Cohen, Express Newspapers' development manager. "The Pre-Press Control system is a critical application that must be available 24x7x365. It looks after all our production needs, controlling the way in which the newspaper is produced and involves nightly critical deadlines."

While the Pre-Press Control System resided on a mainframe, many of the databases that were also previously located on the mainframe system (such as pensions, payroll, advertising, circulation systems) had either already been outsourced or previously migrated to other platforms such as Sun Solaris or Microsoft Windows.

"This left us with a relatively small but extremely vital system on a large mainframe," added Cohen. "The mainframe was being leased at the time, and was coming towards the end of the term of contract. We had to make the decision to continue with the lease, purchase a smaller Unisys mainframe or migrate to the Windows platform."

After an internal consultation between all senior members of the IT staff, Express Newspapers decided that it was expensive, undesirable and ultimately not feasible to conduct a full-scale replacement of the mainframe system. After reviewing the options available, Express selected MSS and Micro Focus to assist with the migration. "We'd had positive experience from working with Micro Focus in the past, particularly with our financial software," says Cohen. "After reviewing the options available to us, we came to the conclusion that the reliability, cost and throughput from Micro Focus would serve our needs. We were impressed with the MSS approach to this project."

As a result, Express contracted MSS to conduct a Lift and Shift migration. The application was migrated from proprietary Unisys hardware and software, Cobol 74 and a hierarchical database system, to an HP Proliant Server running Microsoft Windows with Microsoft SQL Server for data access, MSS technology as middleware and Micro Focus Studio and Server providing a high level of reuse of the Cobol business logic.

The migration was completed in 14 months, ensuring that the new system was up and running in time for the office move. In the meantime, because MSS was able to automate much of the migration process, normal operation and development within the IT department continued without interruption. "We really wanted to ensure that the new system was fully operational prior to the office move and both Micro Focus and MSS delivered on that target. We were very pleased with the timescales involved," says Cohen. "In the last full year of using the mainframe, we were paying ?830,000 for leasing and maintenance. We have gone from a mainframe costing hundreds of thousands of pounds and taking up a huge slice of space in a dedicated computer room, to potentially running the same system on a laptop." The migration has also helped to speed up the pre-press system. "The number of transactions the system is processing has tripled as editorial staff are now able to save page layouts much more frequently," says Cohen.