Capgemini and Transoft complete migration of HP e3000 legacy management systems for bus operator Arriva London

26 October, 2004 – Transoft, a leader in helping companies evolve their existing legacy applications, has just completed an application migration project for Arriva(www.arriva.co.uk) London , the largest bus operating company in London. Transoft worked in conjunction with system integrator Capgemini, Arriva’s long-standing managed services partner, to help Arriva move its critical bus management COBOL systems from the HP e3000 legacy mainframe to an open and more flexible Windows 2003 environment.

“The HP e3000 legacy mid-range mainframe will cease to be supported by HP from 2006,” said Alan Ricot, IT manager at Arriva London. “Migration has reduced not only the cost of ongoing maintenance of the legacy system, but also the business risk of being reliant on a platform nearing end-of-life. It provided us with an opportunity to update our systems, making data easier to interrogate, but didn’t require us to change our working practices which would have involved significant retraining with no guarantees of improved functionality. Instead we’ve been able to retain all of our business functionality with minimal impact on costs.”

Arriva London ran critical bus management systems on the HP e3000 system, including applications that manage bus and staff scheduling, revenue accounting and mileage. Moving these applications while avoiding critical system downtime was essential. At the same time, Arriva wanted the applications, which are used by Arriva’s staff in garages around the UK capital, to have the option of the same ‘look and feel’ as the old ‘green screen‘ terminals, and also have a Windows graphical user interface for other staff where appropriate.

Capgemini managed the overall migration project using Transoft’s expertise in migrating the HP e3000 environment with the Transoft Legacy Liberator migration tool to automate much of the code migration. Business development manager at Capgemini, Barrie Graham, commented: “ Transoft undertook the majority of the COBOL code migration. Ordinarily this may have been a time-consuming project, but with Transoft Legacy Liberator, the project was completed on time and to budget. We were able to demonstrate to Arriva a mini-migration after just 3 months. The data migration process went very smoothly.”

Transoft converted HP’s COBOL code to ANSI standard open systems ACUCOBOL. It used Transoft Adapter software to replace the existing legacy application VPLUS screens and keep the same look and feel for the garages, while additionally offering a new improved graphical user interface in ASP.NET for management use. Transoft Adapter software was also used to replace the HP IMAGE database with an industry standard relational database. The system was installed on an IBM xSeries model 255 server and uses the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system with an SQL Server 2000 database.

“We’ve saved time and potentially money on this migration”, said Arriva's finance director Alan Sewell. “If we’d not have been able to migrate this solution from the old HP system, we could have needed additional people at each depot just to carry out day to day operational functions and with the probability of incurring penalties from not running the contracted service due to incorrect staff allocation. We’ve got a much better system making it much easier to interrogate data for reporting in the future.”

Paul Holland, chief executive officer of Transoft, commented, “Companies like Arriva nearing end-of-life on legacy applications, have three choices. They can either rewrite their code from scratch, replace with a package or migrate. Arriva, like many other companies, found that migration proved the most cost-effective and least-risk option.”

The new system is now live and has been rolled out to 14 Arriva garages around the UK capital. Capgemini has a five year contract to provide on-going support using Transoft's tools and is making the migrated applications available to other interested bus companies.

Barrie Graham concludes "Through the successful migration of the Arriva London HP e3000 application, Transoft has demonstrated to Capgemini that it has the experience to deliver complex projects on time and to budget. They have been a pleasure to work with and we would be happy to engage their services on future migration projects."

About Capgemini

Capgemini (www.capgemini.com), one of the world’s foremost providers of Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing services, has a unique way of working with its clients called the Collaborative Business Experience. This is designed to help clients achieve better, faster, more sustainable results through seamless access to its network of world-leading technology partners and collaboration-focussed methods and tools. Through commitment to mutual success and the achievement of tangible value, Capgemini help businesses implement growth strategies, leverage technology, and thrive through the power of collaboration.

Capgemini employs approximately 55,000 people worldwide in more than 30 countries and reported 2003 global revenue of 5.7 billion euros.

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