Old Mutual, the largest life assurance business in southern Africa, will migrate 15,000 desktops to Microsoft Windows Vista to take advantage of Vista’s improved security features and other benefits including a step toward the goal of a remotely managed desktop environment. Old Mutual, which bought the AOK automated application compatibility testing tool from ChangeBASE to ensure a smooth migration, is planning to start the migration this month.

 “Migrating legacy applications to a new operating system is always a challenge, especially in a large company where the range of such applications is usually wide,” says Mark Briston, the Vista project manager for Old Mutual.

The company tapped the AOK solution because it decided it needed to complete the migration in a shortened timeframe, Briston says.

“We are dealing with a core set of 250 applications including off-the-shelf and bespoke varieties so our original compatibility testing timeframe was planned to be around nine months,” he says. “For various reasons, the nine-month testing period had to be shortened significantly and the project needed to find tools which would save time, reduce testing effort and not require extensive training of project staff. We discovered AOK from ChangeBASE and after a day with their consultants, our project staff was able to use AOK confidently and accurately.”

ChangeBASE developed a utility for the conversion of WSE files to MSI format. Within two days, three core legacy applications had been tested and remediation started on them.

“The project team was confident enough after three days to take over the toolset and continue the testing on their own,” Briston says.

Within a month all 250 applications had been tested, resulting in a major time and cost saving for the project and allowing applications needing remediation to be targeted and corrected much earlier that originally expected.

As a result of the project’s success, Old Mutual and ChangeBASE are currently collaborating on another tool and designing a set of best practices for Old Mutual’s in-house developers, according to ChangeBASE CEO John Tate.