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Capgemini and
Transoft complete migration of HP e3000 critical rolling mill
systems for major UK steel manufacturer
Transoft Legacy Liberator
reduces maintenance costs and business risk as HP e3000
nears end-of-life
September 2007 – Transoft, a leader in helping companies
evolve their existing legacy applications, has completed an
application migration project for a major UK steel
manufacturer. Transoft worked in conjunction with
Capgemini, the
client’s long-standing managed services partner, to help
move a critical steel rolling mill system from a HP e3000
legacy platform to an open and more flexible IBM AIX UNIX
and Oracle environment.
“HP originally proposed to cease support on
the HP e3000 legacy mid-range mainframe from the end of
2006,” said Craig Wild, Client Engagement Manager at
Capgemini, “which drove our client’s decision to want to
move off the platform. The migration with Transoft 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 the client
with an opportunity to update its systems, making data
easier to interrogate by replacing the proprietary HP e3000
database with Oracle, but didn’t require any change to
working practices which would have involved significant
retraining with no guarantees of improved functionality.”
Because of the business criticality of the
application, it was essential that there was minimal
downtime of the client’s mill, while the cutover to the new
system took place. It was imperative that the migrated
application was fully tested and ready for implementation
during the scheduled short shut-down of the mill at the
beginning of August 2006.
Capgemini
managed the overall migration project using the expertise of
Transoft in migrating the HP e3000 environment, with the
Transoft Legacy Liberator migration tools to automate the
majority of the code and data migration. Craig Wild
commented: “Transoft
undertook the COBOL code, screens and data migration.
Ordinarily doing this manually would have been a
time-consuming project, but with Transoft Legacy Liberator,
we were able to demonstrate to our client a subset of the
migrated application after just 3 months. The project
started in January 2006 and the new system went into
production as planned on 1 August 2006 during the mill
shut-down period.”
Transoft converted HP’s COBOL code to ANSI
standard open systems Micro Focus COBOL. It used Transoft
Adapter software to replace the existing legacy application
VPLUS screens and keep the same look and feel for the users.
Transoft Adapter software was also used to replace the HP
IMAGE database with the industry standard Oracle relational
database, and the Transoft MPE library was used to replace
the HP e3000 intrinsic system services. The system was
installed on IBM pSeries model 520 servers with the AIX UNIX
operating system and Oracle 10g.
“Our partner has saved time and money on this
migration, said Craig Wild. “If it had not have been able to
migrate this solution from the old HP system, it would have
had to re-write the application which would have been very
time consuming, very costly and risky for the business. It
has now got a much better system making it much easier to
add new functionality and to interrogate data for reporting
in the future.”
Geoff Baker, managing director of Transoft,
commented, “Companies such as this with applications on
end-of-life legacy platforms, have three choices. They can
either rewrite their code from scratch, replace with a
package or migrate. This company, like many others, found
that migration proved the most cost-effective, minimum
disruption and least-risk option.”
The new system is now live and further
development of the application has started to provide
increased functionality to the business. It was essential
that the application was first migrated before this work
started in the new open system environment.
Craig Wild concludes "Through the successful
migration of this HP e3000 application and partnership
Transoft has demonstrated to Capgemini that it has the
experience to deliver complex projects on time and to
budget. They have been very professional to work with and we
would be happy to engage their services on future migration
projects."
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