Founded in 1959 and now headquartered in El Segundo, California, Computer Sciences Corporation is a leading global IT services company. CSC's mission is to provide customers in industry and government with solutions crafted to meet their specific challenges and enable them to profit from the advanced use of technology.
With approximately 76,000 employees, CSC provides innovative solutions for customers around the world by applying leading technologies and CSC's own advanced capabilities. These include systems design and integration; IT and business process outsourcing; applications software development; Web and application hosting; and management consulting.
Founded in the United Kingdom in 1976, Micro Focus provides world-class software for developing and deploying legacy applications on mainframes, PCs and distributed environments, ensuring that IT departments can make the most of their existing enterprise application systems. As the industry standard for legacy, Micro Focus bridges business-critical legacy assets with .NET, Java, XML and Web services.
Together, they offer a breadth and depth of migration expertise not available from any other single source.
To discuss the approach that both firms have taken successfully, we talked with CSC’s Jay H. White who has worked at CSC for almost 20 years in a variety of roles from application developer, professional service consultant and currently as a managing director of the product development and services delivery of the VANTAGE-ONE suite of products. Jay focuses the product delivery results around enhanced product capability, ease of platform maintenance and ability to process industrial strength product administration. The VANTAGE-ONE suite of products provides life, annuity and compensation administration in conjunction with industry leading enterprise connection capabilities for some of the largest insurers in the US.
Jay, congratulations are in order. I understand that CSC was named in January by Datamonitor as a leader in global insurance technology in one of its recent reports.
Yes, thank you, the report highlighted CSC’s position as the top non-hardware vendor in terms of overall technology market share, and, I believe, the application software market leader with a 15 percent market share.
Jay, as you know well, there’s been a considerable amount of talk for several years about the need for mainframe migration and its applicability to industry groups, including the insurance sector. What’s your best 30-second elevator speech as to why now is the right time to migrate?
The need to reduce expenses and improve ROI is critical to your company’s growth. Shifting mainframe applications to desktops and servers, where computing power is typically under-utilized, is a very effective means for reducing expense and improving ROI.
Mainframes have long proven their value for being reliable, available and secure, delivering high-volume data access and for processing massive amounts of transactions. Unfortunately, they’re also complex, expensive to maintain, resource intensive and based on outdated technology. Frankly, they require a huge investment in applications, skills and data.
How would you characterize the cost comparison between an eight to 10 processor mainframe environment and a Windows data center with an equivalent environment?
An eight – 10 processor IBM z900 2,000 MIP complex is a $10 million investment that includes $4 million for CPUs and memory, $1 million for z/OS, another million for other IBM software and a final $4 million for ISV infrastructure software.
And the other side of the equation?
The Windows environment with the equivalent number of processors and software costs approximately $500,000. Walking away from that number is not easy.
What were some of the obstacles that needed to be overcome allowing forward motion, finally?
CBAs showing the time it takes to get positive ROI is the biggest obstacle. ROI is the biggest obstacle. The second obstacle is training mainframe-oriented staff that the power of their desktop can create a very productive work environment.
What are the benefits, the business goals you believe firms today should be focused on? Does this pertain to better utilization of available data or a faster time-to-market opportunity?
Improving technical staff productivity and quality reduces cost and provides a quicker time-to-market for the end product. The ability for business and end-user staff to review test results in a desktop environment can be a very effective means for verifying new product deliverables leading to faster time-to-market results.
Can you give us a quick scenario you’ve encountered?
In our own product development business unit, we have a 30% reduction in mainframe expense in the past 18 months. At the same time, we also increased the number of deliverables provided to our customers.
In another scenario, a customer migrated an entire mainframe administrative system, ran benchmarking results to compare performance criteria for daily development. The server based platform provided equivalent results in less than four weeks.
What’s the success story you can share to that scenario? What was the carrier striving to accomplish?
The success is the ability to migrate an application from the Mainframe to the server environment in short time frames, reducing the load on the mainframe and providing a more productive development environment for the staff.
Let me take us on a different tack. Having successfully migrated legacy applications to contemporary platforms such as Windows, as you know, many of these applications can still use CICS, for example. But can they be extended to make use of SOA, XML and Web services?
Absolutely. All our applications make use of all these features. In fact, this platform is easier to implement Web services applications compared to the mainframe.
How would you characterize the combination of CSC technology and the Micro Focus ‘Lift and Shift’ methodology that is at the heart of your alliance?
Micro Focus provides the underlying tools, CSC provides the intellectual property. Working together in a partnership provides enhanced tool capability in conjunction with a wide variety of application migration success.
Can you pinpoint two or three instances in which ‘Lift and Shift’, for example, can specifically minimize the risk associated with these types of projects?
Lifting a current well functioning application eliminates the risk of developing an entirely new application in a different language. The reduced time frame provides a quicker ROI because the application is not written from scratch.
CSC has worked with Micro Focus for over 12 years. What led to the relationship?
The relationship revolved around the ability to bring to market an existing application with a new graphical interface. The desire to complete the interface in a short time frame with existing processing capability led us to the use of the Micro Focus tools.
For more information on both CSC and Micro Focus, visit www.csc.com and www.microfocus.com.