Large Financial Service Provider Succeeds in Secure Platform Change with AMELIO Modernization Platform

Away from the Mainframe at the Push of a Button:
Delta’s AMELIO Modernization Platform Enables Large Building Society to Replace Platforms Securely

A leading building society consolidates its platforms and has therefore replaced their IBM mainframe with Red Hat Linux. The migration of the central, strongly interconnected applications, however, involved particular risks, e.g., due to parallel changes and further development. Also, the performance in the new environment was a major concern. With the AMELIO tools from Delta Software Technology, this company successfully migrated its highly critical core application.

The project management particularly praised the good cooperation with the manufacturer. Delta offered the project at a fixed price and was nevertheless very flexible in responding to special requests. Due to the good cooperation with Delta, the transformed application exactly meets the company's requirements.

The Business-critical Centrepiece

The building society sees its social mandate in fulfilling people's desire for home ownership. In order to perfectly support its services, the heart of the IT applications, the core booking system, was developed in-house: Several thousand programs with millions of lines of code process data in one thousand database tables and perfectly support employees in their daily work for several million customers.

Requirements: Absolute Security and Parallel Further Development

As part of the corporate-wide platform consolidation, the core booking system was to be migrated from the previous IBM zOS CICS platform with DB2 databases to Red Hat Linux with Oracle.

The importance of the application resulted in additional requirements for the migration solution:

• No disruption of the day-to-day business
• Permanent availability of the subsystems for parallel changes and further development, no blocking, no freezing
• Consistent adoption of changes and further developments of the productive application for the migration
• Audit-proof documentation of all changes

However, the migration of the core booking system was only part of an extensive overall project. This meant that changes that resulted from other sub-projects had to be considered in the transformation of the core booking system on time. It was also necessary to react flexibly to schedule changes in other projects.
 

The Tailor-made Solution with AMELIO

The financial service provider decided to work with the modernisation specialist Delta Software Technology. Delta offered the company a tailor-made and at the same time fully automated transformation of its core booking system with AMELIO tools at a fixed price.

The Delta tools used:

• AMELIO Logic Discovery
  Complete analysis of the application in advance to determine all the key points and pitfalls for the project.
• AMELIO Modernization Platform
  This adaptive transformation factory works rule-based. As a result, it can be perfectly tailored to the requirements and it also implements operational peculiarities, standards or special rules to improve performance.
  Delta's AMELIO Modernization Platform works fully automated applying a clean room concept: All changes are implemented consistently and in an audit-proof manner in all sources without any manual intervention.
• Data Transformers
  Based on the results of the application analysis with AMELIO Logic Discovery, Delta generated tailor-made data transformers that performed the migration of all data.

With AMELIO Modernization Platform, Delta has configured a highly specialised transformation factory that is perfectly tailored to the project and that automatically, i.e. without manual intervention, implemented the specified mass changes to the programs of the core booking system.

This approach enabled the company to transform new versions of their sources, which emerged from maintenance and further development or by the effects of other projects, at any time during the duration of the project.

Performance

The project management was impressed by the efficiency and flexibility with which the AMELIO factory was set up, continuously optimized and adapted to their needs.

Just one example for the good cooperation and the flexibility of the solution: Everyone who leaves the mainframe worries about the performance of the applications. During the course of the project, performance tests showed that the components in the new environment behaved differently than expected. Delta changed the transformation rules for certain accesses and simply transformed the application again. And the problem was solved!

Planning Reliability and Fixed Costs

Before the project started, Delta performed a complete assessment of all sources with AMELIO Logic Discovery. Through the results of this assessment, the financial service provider has already gained important knowledge for the planning and implementation of the project:

• Which transformations are required?
• What are the key points and pitfalls?
• What are the dependencies?
• How can packages be tailored to bring them into production piece by piece instead of a big bang?
• And what about the project schedule? Which timeframe is realistic?

Moreover, this preparation gave the company additional security with regard to costs:
After the detailed assessment, Delta offered the entire transformation at a fixed price and nevertheless responded to additional requests during the project with extraordinary flexibility.

Successful Transformation In Time and In Budget

With the AMELIO tools from Delta Software Technology, the financial service provider was able to securely migrate the centrepiece of the system, the large, business-critical application developed in COBOL, from the mainframe to the new environment in parallel with ongoing operations.

The following advantages were particularly important for the company:

• During the entire project, the normal maintenance and further development could continue undisturbed. The resulting changes were neatly adopted into the transformation of the application.
• The solution considered the company's own standards and the project management was free to choose between implementation variants.
• The Delta solution also helped optimising the application for the new platform. New insights into the runtime behaviour of the application in the new environment could automatically be applied for the transformation of the entire application.
• The partial packages were taken into production step by step - without a big bang.
• The application performed well in the new environment
• No footprint, no vendor lock-in: Delta’s tools are no longer required after the transformation. The company does not incur any follow-up costs.

A degree of automation of 99.5% was achieved by using the AMELIO Modernization Platform, i.e. 4,478 programs of 4,500 programs were transformed completely automatically. 22 programs required a special solution. They were modified in advance before they were also transformed completely automatically.

The company's project manager and the managing director of Delta Software Technology, Dr. Daniela Schilling agree:
"The open communication and the excellent cooperation between all employees and those responsible made a significant contribution to the success of the project."

Delta Software Technology

Delta Software Technology is a specialist for automated solutions that help their customers to develop and modernise their individual IT applications securely and sustainably.

Delta's tools and tailor-made solutions are particularly characterised by reliably calculable costs as well as sustainable and future-proof investment security. Customers reduce costs and risks for the maintenance, modernisation and re-implementation of their applications and gain flexibility, freedom of choice and security.