Idea Integration Brings 17 Years of Experience in Customized Migration Services to Your Mainframe Environment

Idea Integration (legacy@idea.com), an IT consulting and technology solution firm headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, is part of MPS Group, a publicly held $1.9 billion corporation (NYSE: MPS). According to Steve Steuart, senior vice president for legacy solutions, Idea has provided migration services since the early 1990s and its methodology has been the foundation for its comprehensive migration solution. Idea’s migration tool suite reliably extracts business logic and data from existing applications and re-deploys it in today’s leading platforms, databases and language technologies.

WFS: What services do you offer for migrating from one infrastructure to another?

SS: Assessment, planning, code conversion, project management, quality assurance and implementation assistance. However, assessment is key. If you don’t know what you have, you can’t know where you’re going.

WFS: Why?

SS: Business today requires real-time response, rapid development of new products and offerings, and the flexibility to respond to a changing technology landscape at a lower cost and faster ROI. However, the age and complexity of many mainframe systems make it difficult to attain the high-tech, low-cost responsiveness that firms require, leading them to examine their legacy systems and assess how to meet demands.

WFS: Their options?

SS: Replace, rewrite, migrate or modernize by infusing new technology to maximize business value.

WFS: How do you deal with the complexity of legacy apps?

SS: Because of the inherent complexity of most legacy apps and the lack of accurate documentation, most firms aren’t fully aware of their apps’ structure. Experience worldwide led us to develop Legacy Documentation, a tool providing necessary information for any project involving legacy systems. It supports all four options, delivering critical input for the roadmap to enable the movement of applications/data to new platforms and technologies. In some cases, firms opt to undertake large, manual projects to analyze their portfolio and produce a snapshot of their systems. This time-intensive approach ignores an important reality about applications, that they’re frequently updated and improved.

WFS: Why’s this important?

SS: Each time a change to an application is made, its snapshot is no longer accurate. Legacy Documentation leverages the current ‘in production’ applications to give the most accurate representation of the application.

WFS: Beyond Legacy Documentation, what else?

SS: Services and products that allow clients to build robust mission-critical applications and re-host existing applications from the mainframe to a Windows platform, taking full advantage of Microsoft’s technology, including SharePoint and .NET.

WFS: For example…

SS: Utilizing an extensive set of legacy renovation and migration tools and services, we migrate legacy apps from Unisys or IBM mainframes to Windows. Our toolset includes application assessment plus application migration and conversion for databases like DMSII, ISAM, DB2 and even IMS.

WFS: What about an end-to-end solution?

SS: Our migration suite is built upon years of expertise. We’ve developed COBOL parsers transforming your code to function in the Windows environment.

WFS: Didn’t you start out as a 4GL company generating COBOL?

SS: Which is why we know the unique differences when trying to port these apps to a Windows environment. We also partnered with Micro Focus to provide .NET class libraries so a .NET programmer can invoke a class from C#.

WFS: Any other tools?

SS: There’s XGEN, a COBOL-code generator that dramatically increases productivity by enabling a COBOL programmer to work jointly on projects with .NET programmers.

WFS: And you can leverage BizTalk and HIS?

SS: Yes, we’re a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with nine solution competencies: mobility; learning; business intelligence; security; advanced infrastructure; information worker; custom development; network infrastructure; and business process and integration solutions. Meaning, we can design the architecture, train your staff and leverage the technologies best suited for your business.