“Our VAX hardware had required a major upgrade” said Alan King, Chief Engineer at Balfour Beatty Power Networks, “and there was obviously the ongoing and increasing maintenance costs, and inherent risk of running our business critical product design suite on a proprietary platform. With our migration to Windows we were able to deploy the application on a far more cost-effective platform, while ensuring we could maintain the competitive advantage we gained from this bespoke system.”

Transoft initially conducted a Pathfinder Project in order to assess the scope and complexities of the project, and then used Transoft Legacy Liberator tools to automate the majority of the ALGOL and Fortran code migration to Windows Server 2003. “Transoft’s proven migration methodology and initial PathFinder process helped us to analyse the migration before we even started, and gave us the confidence that Transoft was able to handle this complex project” adds Alan King. “Up front they provided us with a firm cost for the entire project, and delivered the migration to this budget.”

The migration of the product design application has ensured that Balfour Beatty continues to enjoy its competitive benefits and an increasing return on its investment. In addition, no retraining for users was required.

Geoff Baker, managing director of Transoft, commented, “Companies like Balfour Beatty Power Networks with applications on ageing legacy platforms, have three choices. They can rewrite their code from scratch, replace with a package or migrate. Balfour Beatty, like many other companies, found that migration proved the most cost-effective, minimum disruption and least-risk option.”

Alan King concludes: “Right from the initial contact, our experience of working with Transoft has shown them to be very professional. Their analysis of our requirements, tried and trusted migration methodology and ability to resolve the inevitable technical issues that arise on a project of this complexity successfully enabled us to migrate this critical system to a more cost effective platform, allowing us to continue to run and enhance it in a modern Windows environment.”