An application that took UK`s largest direct marketing bookseller up to 40 minutes to run on the mainframe, has been reduced to just 20 seconds, thanks to services provided by South African migrations specialist MigrationWare together with technology provided by Micro Focus.
Book Club Associates (BCA) has replaced its dispatch and logistics system by migrating applications from a Fujitsu ICL mainframe to Windows, in a project involving MigrationWare and its partner Micro Focus, the leading provider of legacy development software for enterprise platforms.
It was no mean task being set by BCA, a company which has 20 general and specialist book clubs, owns Books Online and has two million members. It also had a very tight timescale for the carrier change and needed to have the new software working and producing documentation without skipping a beat.
BCA opted for a solution based on Net Express with .NET and Application Server - known as Micro Focus Studio and Micro Focus Server - to port the applications to the new platform in line with its decision to run its WMW (Manhattan) logistics platform on the same technology network.
Modules of code that were required by the document production applications were part of a totally integration system on the mainframe, which were being replaced by the organisation, piece by piece. It involved many thousands of lines of source code which had to be converted to a new technical paradigm in order to preserve existing functionality. Many of BCA`s batch programs were driven by mainframe SCL which meant that a large amount of command line processing also needed to be migrated from SCL to the Windows equivalent environment and to Micro Focus COBOL.
A critical component, compounding the difficulties of the multi-faceted migration of the applications onto a new platform, was being able to automatically validate the success of the migration.
MigrationWare`s Regression Manager was selected by Micro Focus to facilitate this. The migration tool provides a dynamic view of the runtime environment on the mainframe, identifying all components that interacted as part of system production run. In addition, Regression Manager automatically produced Windows batch scripts for the re-running of the migrated applications, as well as automatically comparing results to prove that no differences were produced by running the original application in the new environment.
"Our Regression Manager was a key to validating the success of migrating from Fujitsu ICL to Micro Focus COBOL code," said MigrationWare director Joao De Oliveira. "It also assured BCA that the migration risk would be minimised and that the success of the project could be guaranteed."
MigrationWare also provided its specialist Fujitsu ICL migration products and services, including the conversion of all SCL scripts, application programs and data.
BCA developer Alison Richards said that following the migration, BCA`s applications performance has improved significantly.
"The application used to take between 20 to 40 minutes to run on the mainframe," said Richards. "With the new system it takes just 20 seconds. This is a tremendous increase in productivity and also means that any backlog in orders can be quickly addressed."
BCA has reduced costs significantly by eliminating mainframe leasing costs. In the first year BCA forecasts it will make a 50% saving of lb200 000 with a one-off upfront investment of lb100 000.
For more information, please visit www.migrationware.com.
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