Transoft, a leader in helping companies evolve their existing legacy applications, has successfully completed an application migration project for Christie’s, the world's leading art business. Transoft migrated Christie’s critical property auction system "PROPERTY" from an ageing Data General (DG) system to an open and more flexible Windows Server 2003 environment. Transoft used its Legacy Liberator toolset to automate the migration process and hence shorten delivery times, minimize costs and ensure the quality of the migration.

Some of Christie’s business IT systems, including the PROPERTY system, were based on end-of-life DG hardware, operating and data management systems. DG ceased manufacturing these systems in the mid-1990s and software products were revision-locked at the same time. Although these systems were supported, replacement parts were becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.

Andy Foster, Christie’s Chief Operating Officer, commented, "The system that runs a key part of the main operations of Christie’s business has been developed over the last 20+ years and contains customised functionality to support the unique nature of Christie’s business. However, the system’s continued dependency on the DG mainframe was viewed as an unacceptable business risk. With there being no possible package replacement for the system, migration offered the quickest, cheapest and minimum risk option."

Christie’s undertook extensive system and usability testing of the newly migrated application, after which Transoft assisted Christie’s in the roll-out to London, New York, Hong Kong and to offices in a further nine cities across the world.

Paul Bradbrook, Transoft’s Managing Director, commented, "Companies like Christie’s, with legacy applications on a near end-of-life platform, have three options. They can rewrite their code from scratch, replace with a package, or migrate. Christie’s, like many other organizations, found that migration proved to be the most cost-effective and lowest risk option. And migration, as we have found at Christie’s, is usually the first step in an evolving modernization strategy in which Transoft continues to assist."

Further Technical details:

The Christie’s system, running on Data General Eclipse MV hardware and the AOS/VS II operating system, was written in DG COBOL and DG CLI using the DG INFOS II hierarchical database management system. The application supported a character-based user interface via terminal emulation. Following a short PathFinder Assessment project of the system, Transoft provided Christie’s with a fixed price and timescale for its migration. Transoft used its Legacy Liberator toolset to convert the DG COBOL code to Micro Focus COBOL and migrated the application’s data to Transoft's U/FOS data management system, a clone of the DG INFOS II. The project also used Transoft’s deployment software that provides support for the DG AOS/VS II system services, CLI, a specialist Telnet server, and a batch queue and print manager. The migrated application was deployed on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on IBM hardware servers.