Neo Product Line Proves Essential in Achieving Projected Savings of 25% of Legacy System
BEND, Oregon, June 15, 2010 – Alchemy Solutions, Inc., provider of legacy modernization solutions, today announced that the United Transportation Union (UTU) has turned to Alchemy Solutions in a strategic move to unplug the UTU mainframe and migrate to Microsoft .NET. UTU is using NeoData, NeoKicks, and NeoBatch from Alchemy Solutions to adapt data and applications from an IBM 9000 series VSE mainframe and convert them to the .NET framework.
UTU, an AFL-CIO affiliate headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, is a broad-based, transportation labor union representing about 125,000 active and retired railroad, bus and mass transit workers in the United States and Canada. With offices in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., the UTU is the largest railroad operating union in North America, with more than 500 locals.
According to UTU Network Administrator Cary Nitschke, “Alchemy Solutions provided the necessary software to migrate applications and data, allowing UTU to eliminate our mainframe. The 9000 series machine’s operating system, DOS VSE, is no longer supported by IBM, although UTU was still paying licensing fees.” The system has just gone live, and Nitschke projects savings of 25%, as the result of eliminating VSE licensing costs and other savings, even after the costs for any new servers and desktop machines are considered.
Three software products from Alchemy Solutions are proving essential in this process, said Nitschke:
* NeoBatch is the batch migration solution for bringing mainframe JCL to the Windows/.NET environment. NeoBatch lowers enterprises’ operating expenses by leveraging Windows-based hardware and software.
* NeoKicks provides a wizard that takes CICS COBOL programs and associated BMS maps, converts them to the .NET-compatible forms, and populates a Visual Studio project for building and testing migrated code. At runtime NeoKicks services handle the CICS commands, providing the equivalent .NET functionality.
* NeoData migrates VSAM (KSDS) or indexed file data to Microsoft® SQL Server® without rewriting legacy COBOL code. Application users can store data in SQL Server without having to go through difficult and risky code and data transformations.
Widely recognized as the leader among transportation labor unions, the UTU sets the pace in national and state legislative activity, collective bargaining, and in efforts to improve safety and working conditions on the railroads and in the bus, transit and airline industries. All of its systems were mainframe-based, including ledger, billing, claims, membership, and others. “UTU’s primary motivation for the move was financial, and revolved around the requirement to license an operating system which was not being supported,” commented Nitschke. When UTU migrated its data center facility, it unplugged the mainframe and left it behind, he added.
Secondarily, the migration offered an opportunity to modernize its system and make UTU’s programmers more effective and efficient. Rather than re-coding green screens and deploying to see how they run, going to Visual Studio with its visual debugging approach was important, as “turnaround time was a big incentive,” he said. “The time required to make a change on the mainframe and test the code was becoming a really big issue.”
UTU’s programming staff was most experienced in COBOL, and the Alchemy Solutions approach did not require re-training. “To give them the option of still maintaining the code and CICS products was important. Otherwise, they would need to be re-trained in JAVA,” remarked Nitschke. As part of a proof-of-concept project, Alchemy converted the code from one application. “We could see the old code, how the new code was handling it, and get a better idea of how things worked.” If the experience had turned out to be unsatisfactory, “We could always go back to the old system, recompile, and revert.”
Although he appreciated the safety net, Nitschke acknowledged it was never required. “It was really a good fit. Alchemy Solutions was the best way to go.” UTU is now running its migrated applications and data without the VSE machine and its associated costs.
