Fujitsu has been committed to 64-bit computing for years. This year has been a particularly busy one, with the launch of the Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST server line in April, and supporting advances in software and services to further smooth the transition of mission critical applications toward a 64-bit environment.
We connected with Richard McCormack, senior vice president, product and solutions marketing, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Ron Langer, vice president of global COBOL sales, Fujitsu Software Corporation, and Joe Clark, senior vice president with Fujitsu Consulting to get a complete, three-pronged view of how Fujitsu sees 64-bit computing progressing into the future.
What are the drivers pushing financial services clients toward 64-bit computing?
McCormack: Financial services customers need systems that have large amounts of main memory; they work with large data sets. In those aspects 64-bit computing is ideally suited for the financial community.
In addition to high performance and the ability to better work with large data sets clients want a system with room for growth. They want to future proof, if you will, with a system that will be able to expand with them. Financial firms tend to be on the leading edge of technology and are often looking at future needs.
Clark: Generally there is a clear inflection point between price performance, the maturing of technology, markets that demand more business agility and tightening regulatory compliance requirements. Clients are starting to reduce their reliance on traditional mainframe applications because their confidence is increasing around open technologies; there is a clear price/performance benefit and more importantly they gain flexibility in their business applications that must adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Effectively our client’s applications are being forced to change and the time/costs are driving a review of their existing technology and platform standards.
We believe that our Financial Services clients will embrace 64-bit technologies as a core to their technology architecture. It offers greater price/performance benefits, provides the ability to scale and can provide a platform that can perform significant processing capabilities without necessarily distributing applications across multiple servers. This is important for legacy enterprise applications that do require re-engineering.
The big news from Fujitsu in the server space this year was the introduction of PRIMEQUEST. For firms interested in 64-bit computing, what advantages do PRIMEQUEST servers offer?
McCormack: PRIMEQUEST servers were launched in April 05 and are the result of a two-year collaborative development effort between Fujitsu and Intel. The server line was built from the ground up for 64-bit computing, and designed with the goals of high performance, high reliability and high-end processing. There are two features of PRIMEQUEST servers that are particularly special: one is System Mirror, which mirrors certain areas of memory and can isolate errors without causing a system halt, and the other is Flexible I/O (FIO), a highly flexible storage management feature that allows on-demand redirection of I/O resources to specific processing resources. It also enables I/O to match real-time performance requirements while avoiding disruption of business operations and significantly shortens maintenance downtime compared to current industry standards.
Where do you see PRIMEQUEST servers fitting into a firm’s infrastructure?
McCormack: Our target area is a firm’s most mission-critical applications, which are usually found on the mainframe. We found that many of our financial clients who were used to working in a mainframe environment were looking for similar characteristics to the mainframe – or as good if not better reliability and performance, and we have achieved that with features like System Mirror and Flexible I/O.
What types of applications have your financial clients been interested in migrating to PRIMEQUEST servers?
McCormack: Applications like risk management, portfolio applications, any OLTP (online transaction processing) application or an application that needs to manage large amounts of data. Also, anything that is real-time or that would be improved with real-time processing.
Langer: We’ve seen a lot of back-office applications, customer processing, and financial services processing. One of our clients is AtosEuronext, the IT arm of the European stock exchange. They moved off a mainframe and have that system running in production. The cost difference was dramatically lower. They were spending 360,000 euros a month and they replaced it with a system that is costing them 70,000 euros a month in a Windows server, and got much better performance. They cited a reduction in batch time from 1 hour, 25 minutes down to seven minutes. COBOL, CICS and JCL were seamlessly mixed with C#, VB and VBScript, and their first two development projects were 50 percent cheaper than what it would have cost on the mainframe.
Let’s talk about NetCOBOL. What part of the process of migrating to 64-bit does Fujitsu manage?
Langer: Our tools are targeted toward making it easy to move the custom applications that exist on a mainframe and are written in COBOL or CICS into the .NET Framework to leverage and take advantage of 64-bit computing.
We are already integrated into Visual Studio – we look like VB or C# and provide the same capability that you would have with them. The editors and debuggers are all available to a COBOL programmer moving from mainframe development to .NET. COBOL programmers can be comfortable moving, because there is a shallow learning curve as they stay in COBOL, but use the same tools as VB and C#. Plus having all their developers use the same toolset reduces training costs for companies.
Is there anything on the horizon from a software perspective that will help propel these migrations forward even faster?
Langer: From our point of view it will really take off as Visual Studio 2005 ships in November. With the next version of .NET, the combination of having better tools and more hardware choices will be powerful. We will have the same integration with the next version of Visual Studio that we currently have, but the 2005 version provides added support for 64-bit machines.
What is Fujitsu Consulting’s role in the process of migrating to .NET?
Clark: I think our role is, first and foremost, to assist customers in developing a business and technical value assessment that clearly aligns any potential investments to business value. This will help drive not only the target business and technology architecture, but will also provide clear measurements and visibility into the anticipated benefits. From that point on our approach is designed to provide a full life-cycle of business and IT services including business process re-engineering, enterprise architecture, project and program management and systems integration services across a variety of on-shore, near-shore and offshore delivery models. Our Legacy Modernization approach also leverages automated tools to minimize the overall cost and to leverage as much existing investments as possible.
What are the software challenges of migrating to the 64-bit environment?
Langer: We have automated tools to help do most of the code conversion. The biggest issue around migrating the data is testing. For migrating something like payroll, the testing is not inexpensive because there will be a lot of testing, but this is off-set by the fact that things that companies paid millions for on the mainframe, they will now find they are paying hundreds of thousands for.
And with COBOL, it’s easy to move between 32-bit and 64-bit – the things you normally do in COBOL aren’t affected by that move, so it’s really just about testing.
And the challenges from a consulting perspective?
Clark: Clients that make a leap from the mainframe to more open systems can have a steep learning curve. There are challenges in going from a monolithic mainframe environment to one that is highly distributed. From an operational point of view, the data center management is more complex due to the distributed nature and also the wide variety of software tools required to manage the environment. There also tend to be cultural issues here as well since organizations tend to resist change and put technology interest in front of the business needs. On the application side the underlying architecture will most likely change in particular when embracing Service Oriented Architectures.
What type of training do you provide to help make that move?
Clark: We provide a fairly rigorous program that has a clear methodology toward application migration and transformation. It’s a disciplined methodology that minimizes risk and maximizes benefits while leveraging automated conversion tools. We work closely with our clients’ personnel in order to leverage their existing knowledge and more importantly to train them so that they can continue ongoing support of the business. Preserving institutional knowledge and cross training are key and much more effective than removing and rehiring. We have also found this critical from a Change Management point of view as well.
What type of training is required for COBOL programmers to learn to develop in a 64-bit environment?
Langer: Typically it’s just a couple of weeks. It’s a shallow learning curve, because we are not training a new language, we are just teaching the differences. The way it works, after a couple weeks of training, a mentor continues to work with them to make sure they understand the changes and the best practices.
What type of cost differential have you seen between the two systems?
Langer: Because the mainframe is so expensive in comparison, the cost of development goes down quite a bit. The tools surrounding .NET have more capabilities. Companies that have already done the migration are finding they are taking half the time to do ongoing development in Visual Studio. So it’s less expensive with more agility.
When do you see 64-bit computing moving into the mainstream?
McCormack: It already is. For a few years now all the Enterprise Server systems we have been selling have been 64-bit.
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