DBV-Winterthur
The DBV-Winterthur insurance company is one of Germanys’ leading insurance groups. The focal point of their product range is life assurances followed by indemnity and health insurance.
Initial Situation
In 1994, DBV (Deutsche Beamtenversicherung) and Winterthur insurance merged. Both companies dealt with property insurances; DBV-Winterthur was also active the personal insurance market. The IT worlds of each company were very different: while DBV used UNISYS OS/2200, Winterthur relied on IBM MVS and CICS.
The Ambitious Goal
The IBM platform used by Winterthur was selected as the future IT platform.
The property insurance applications from Winterthur, already running on this platform, were to be retained; hence for this line of business only DBV's data needed to be migrated. For the personal insurance line of business both, the DBV's applications and the data needed to be migrated from the UNISYS to IBM platform.
Project Realization
The excellent architecture of DBV's personal insurance applications significantly simplified the migration. The previous application was developed with the Delta/ADS application development product.
As a result the changeover from the old AVS data storage system on UNISYS to VSAM on IBM only required that the ADS file access macros had to be modified. The application programs only needed to be regenerated for the new IBM target platform. No alterations were made to the application programs because of the target platform portability provided by ADS.
Even the change of the TP monitor did not require alterations to the application programs, the screen layout descriptions were automatically converted to the ADS layout description format. The online control program used to connect to IBM CICS, which had been hand-written by the DBV developers, was rewritten using ADS.
Result
Using the Delta generator technology, based on a strict separation of the technical infrastructure code from the actual application code, the migration was completed on schedule, smoothly and above all, without alteration to the core application programs.