1 December 2006

As its name suggests, the mainframe has been the core support of many businesses. But as new technologies intensify the competitive environment, Jacqui Griffiths looks at the reasons why companies are moving to Windows.

Technology evolves at an alarming rate, and it changes the way businesses work. The most prominent example is perhaps the Internet, which became a regular business tool in the mid-1990s. While this has vastly increased the reach of many organisations, it has also increased expectations about speed ? the speed of communication, service, and responsiveness to change. The Web knows no boundaries, and a company that is national today could be international tomorrow. It stands to reason that the technologies that put businesses ahead of the field ten years ago will not be able to keep pace with the demands of today.

The mainframe is a case in point. For decades, mainframes provided a robust, secure and reliable solution, supporting multiple users with a wide range of business-critical functionalities. But other technologies have caught up with the mainframe in terms of security and robustness, and have outstripped it to enable faster, more responsive and more cost-effective ways of doing business.

Indeed, the very longevity and stability that made the mainframe so popular have also prevented it from keeping up in terms of flexibility. The number of IT workers with the expertise and experience to maintain mainframe code is shrinking. That code is often decades old, and support for it is dwindling, and support costs are compounded by the high cost of hardware and licences.

Meanwhile, an entire community of users has grown up around Internet-connected PCs, with local processing capabilities that enable competing businesses to pile on the pressure by rapidly responding to changes in the market place. Even people working for a mainframe-supported organisation are likely to go home and work or play on a Windows computer. From a business perspective, pitting the mainframe against this more flexible type of system means missed market opportunities and a negative impact on price, profit and competitiveness.

Many of the companies driving this competitive environment are supported by Windows ? as well as being supported by Microsoft's ongoing investment in research and development, a diverse group of solution providers has grown up around it. Many companies migrating to Windows have relied on midrange or mainframe systems for years, and they do not take the decision to migrate lightly.

AmerenUE's Callaway Nuclear Plant in Missouri has migrated entirely from its old mainframe system.

When Callaway went into operation in 1984, it set the standard for effective information and records management processes, systems and procedures. It was supported by a mainframe computing environment with applications developed in-house. As it approached its twentieth year, however, it found that it was falling behind.

Having been down-rated by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators due to processing, upgrading and workforce issues, Callaway needed to modernise its equipment and its processes. Its mainframe could no longer support the demands of the business in an increasingly competitive, fast-moving environment, and the expense of replacing it would have been prohibitive.

Callaway's IT department was battling to keep up with new types of data and PC-based software tools while complying with records management regulations and providing accurate, timely and relevant information for users. The plant needed to maximise productivity, minimise costs and maintain safety standards in an environment where more and more unstructured content was being created and there was an increasing need for rapid access to accurate, concise and valid plant information. In order to achieve this, it needed to move away from the mainframe to an environment that would make information readily available to those who needed it.

Callaway chose an eB Suite platform from Spescom Software for its document and records management, with a multi-tier service-oriented architecture based on Microsoft technology. This would enable increased productivity and a lower total cost of ownership because of its scalability, flexibility, rapid application development and simplified integration with other systems.

Productivity and supportability, especially in light of in-house applications development, were key criteria in Callaway's decision, as well as the cost savings that would come from being able to get rid of expensive hardware and software leases.

A major benefit of migration from mainframe and midrange systems is the increases to productivity it can bring. Callaway used the open architecture and application programming interface of its new eB environment to develop two tailored front-end applications that answered its specific needs in terms of productivity and flexibility: Callaway Document Room is a Web-based portal that lets users search, retrieve, view and print any document from any location using a standard Web browser, while Callaway Director is an intuitive interface for managing the Callaway Equipment List and nuclear engineering design change process.

By integrating the solution with the applications that generate records, and electronically transferring them into it, Callaway streamlined and automated its records management, virtually eliminating the labour-intensive processing of paper-based records while ensuring compliance and managing secure access to confidential information.

The company also automated the revision and management of over 100,000 plant drawings. All changes are now managed through standard workflows that ensure their timely completion and approval while giving full visibility of their status. Callaway's equipment list, which contains over 200,000 components, was also transferred from the mainframe to eB, which ensures consistency through a classification structure.

By automating information management in this way, Callaway was able to significantly reduce the amount of manual processing it did, so staff could focus on profitable areas of the business. Productivity was further enhanced because of improved visibility and rapid access to all critical plant information, which is stored in a secure digital vault. This in turn means better decision-making, and therefore better responsiveness and agility which will in turn lead to more efficiency and productivity in the future. Its migration from the mainframe gave it a secure system with a more rigorous management process, enabling full visibility of the impact of any change so risk is also reduced.

Mainframes and midrange systems demand hefty investments in hardware, expensive software licensing, and maintenance expertise that is increasingly costly as it grows harder to find.

In migrating from its mainframe environment, Callaway enabled significantly reduced total cost of ownership for its IT system, with associated cost reductions coming from its enhanced efficiency, productivity and agility.

By consolidating multiple applications on a single platform, Callaway streamlined its business processes while and applications unified and integrated. It no longer has to recapture information from one application to another, and IT support costs are lower because of massive reductions in hardware investments, rapid learning curve, and the ready availability of support and expertise.

For Callaway, the decision to migrate was a natural progression as its legacy system became outdated, necessitating an upgrade project. It looked at a wide range of solutions on offer, and realised that migrating to Windows offered the most in terms of flexibility, reliability, scalability and support for future growth at a cost that is much lower than mainframe or midrange systems will allow.