6 July 2007

Xafinity Paymaster is the service integrator of the Office of HM Paymaster General (OPG), a division of HM Revenue and Customs. OPG is responsible for holding the working balances of UK Government departments and other public bodies in high-level accounts at the Bank of England, where they are made available to the National Loans Fund overnight to reduce the Government's borrowing costs. OPG operates a bank account ledger system and a full range of banking services via outsourcing arrangements with selected commercial banks, the Bank of England and Xafinity Paymaster.

The Xafinity Paymaster banking suite runs critical code for the control and reconciliation of payable orders, which Xafinity Paymaster processes on behalf of the OPG. Xafinity Paymaster needed to move its critical banking suite Cobol-based systems from its legacy ICL VME mainframe to an open systems environment which would give better performance. It chose Transoft to migrate its applications to a Microsoft Windows 2003 environment. Part of the Computer Software Group, Transoft is a Microsoft Gold partner and a leader in helping companies evolve their existing legacy applications.

"The Banking Suite was the last remaining application on our ICL mainframe which was planned to be shut down and removed by the end of April 2006," explains Ralph Tigwell, director of business technology at Xafinity Paymaster. "It was imperative that along with removing the ICL Trimetra mainframe, the migrated suite had to run with almost total transparency to the staff who use it."

The new Microsoft Windows based system has delivered cost savings, streamlined processes and simplified operations. When the legacy mainframe application was finally switched off there was no disruption to data or services. The whole project was brought in on time and within budget by the Transoft team, which has significant expertise in complex system migrations. Failure to deliver on time could have left Xafinity Paymaster facing unnecessary expense in the form of another 12 months' licence fees for its legacy system.

"I am very pleased to report that after a month's parallel running we were able to go live mid-April as we originally planned at the start of the project last October, and now we have switched off the mainframe," says Tigwell. "The new HP DL360 2 processor Microsoft Windows 2003 platform has not only saved significant costs but is processing the work many times faster than before, allowing us to reduce to a single shift operation."

Karl Noakes, director of the partner development group at Microsoft, comments: "As a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, Transoft is among the elite of the Microsoft partner community. Our Gold partners are highly equipped to deliver business-driven technology solutions like this to their customers and are highly valued by Microsoft."

Transoft Legacy Liberator Cobol Converter was used to migrate both the online and batch ICL Cobol and DDS definitions to ANSI standard open systems Micro Focus Cobol and the files to Micro Focus FileShare. Transoft Legacy Liberator TP monitor replaced the ICL TPMS and screens to provide the same look and feel and the Transoft SCL converter and the ICL9 system services replacement library were also used. The Fox IT Helmsman scheduler was replaced by the Transoft U/QuBE Queue and Printer Manager. The system was then installed on a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 platform.

David Nunn, Xafinity Paymaster's banking services director, comments: "We selected Transoft because we believed it had the tools and the people to get the job done at the right price. If we had not been able to migrate the banking suite application off the ICL mainframe we would have had to renew its lease for a further year at considerable cost. We now have the application on a much lower cost platform and with the increased performance we are now able to take additional steps to further automate the suite and reduce the cost of its operation."

Geoff Baker, managing director of Transoft, says: "Organisations like Xafinity Paymaster, with applications on platforms that are either costing too much or nearing end-of-life, have three choices. They can rewrite their code from scratch, replace with a package, or migrate. Paymaster, like many other companies, found that migration proved the most cost effective and least risk option."

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