HP Solves the Challenges of Legacy Environments with an Adaptive Enterprise Solution Down Under

HP has carved out a niche for itself in application modernization, and specifically now in legacy mainframe application modernization. When undertaking such work, it’s essential to focus on the entire environment – not just a single application – and it’s what HP has been doing for years. According to Richard Holling, director, insurance sector, financial services at HP, “In the 1990’s, modernization meant mainly transitioning onto UNIX platforms, but in the last few years, we’ve seen a growing acceptance of Windows technology.”

WFS: Richard, what are the challenges today of legacy environments?

RH: Today, many organizations can attribute constraints on their business performance to the limitations of their aging infrastructure, specifically to legacy applications. Living with limitations imposed on your business by outdated legacy applications places unacceptable risks on the organization.

WFS: What are they?

RH: Constraints on business performance, an inability to manage change, difficulty in establishing a competitive barrier or advantage, escalating expenses, limits on services you can offer today and in the future and the unfulfilled potential of IT. While firms understand the need to update legacy applications, modernizing presents risks, both in the process and final result. These risks can be managed but existing suppliers don’t say that.

WFS: And that leaves firms in a state of indecision?

RH: Yes and many that are indecisive about how to handle legacy applications are losing their competitive position to companies that can compete more effectively with more agile and adaptive systems.

WFS: What is HP’s answer?

RH: The Adaptive Enterprise. It provides improved application agility in an environment where business processes and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change.

WFS: And application modernization?

RH: HP’s Application Modernization helps CIOs and companies manage legacy system transitions from an outdated, inflexible legacy environment to a more efficient, lower-cost standardized platform to maximize the business value of applications.

By definition, Application Modernization is a set of services, tools, methodologies and architectures that maximize the business value of legacy applications through measurable transitioning stages and strategies.

WFS: By talking to us, you’re talking to readers running at least a portion of their business using legacy applications. What would you be asking if you were face-to-face?

RH: How are the limitations of your existing legacy applications impacting your ability to meet today’s business needs?

How do you measure the effort that your IT organization is investing in application maintenance versus application innovation?

How will this change in the next year?

What factors will determine when it’s the right time to evaluate transforming your application layer to a modernized, lower-cost platform versus continuing on the path of application maintenance?

What type of competitive advantage could you gain by improving applications that reduce delivery costs while significantly improving customer satisfaction?

What would be the benefit if you could radically improve IT flexibility while decreasing overall costs and increasing efficiency?

WFS: Can you give an example of how HP helped an insurance services firm find the right answers?

RH: WorkCover Corporation is the statutory authority that provides South Australians with an occupational health, safety, rehabilitation and compensation system. Its goal is to save lives and reduce the cost of workplace safety through a range of information and education activities, from customer interaction and prevention programs, to processing compensation claims.

Running the mainframe was becoming a very expensive option that lacked flexibility and good analysis tools. It didn’t represent a very sensible strategic platform for the future. They saw enormous opportunities for embracing technologies such as Web services, which would benefit their marketing, education and customer service functions.

They approached us to provide project management, architectural and consulting services during the design and install of a significant new IT hardware and software environment that would replace an aging legacy mainframe system with a Microsoft-based solution, and provide greater flexibility for systems integration.

WFS: Frame the business situation for us.

RH: Since 1991 the authority had been storing insurance claims and other information on workplace injuries on a mainframe. With application processes written primarily in COBOL, the mainframe managed WorkCover’s entire line of business, enabling internal staff and claims agents to access information such as client history, medical records, employer registrations and financial premium and compensation payment data. Their existing mainframe was reliable but not suitable for upcoming business activities or budgets.

WFS: How long did the project take?

RH: Start to finish, 13 months. It included two paths, the creation of new Web services functionality and the upgrade of the existing corporate system architecture to a Microsoft platform.

WFS: How involved were internal resources?

RH: WorkCover’s internal IT team played a crucial and substantial role in the business and technical transformation, supported by many major stakeholders, especially Microsoft Consulting with assistance from local Microsoft partners. The legacy development stream required the mainframe environment to be recreated, running under Microsoft Windows 2000, which meant porting all the programs and data to the new system and re-implementing all support elements on the new platform.

Their initial goal was to reproduce development and support mechanisms that had been built over a decade on the mainframe. On the surface, porting a mainframe environment from one platform to another sounds rather simple. What made it such a challenging and wide-ranging project was the need to integrate all of the related business and support processes. It’s not just data that needed converting but all of the associated business logic, which consisted of hundreds of individual programs that had been developed in COBOL. They had to be ported requiring new systems to manage the program conversion and data migration tasks.

Because manual conversion of the source code wasn’t an option, the development team needed to investigate alternatives to address complicated compatibility issues. Subtle differences ranging from language syntax to hardware feature compatibility issues was an interesting challenge.

WFS: Meaning?

RH: We were effectively taking a fat client/server system and re-engineering it to support a three-tier client/middle-tier server arrangement. Where existing mainframe code depended on a hardware capability not available on the new platform, code to emulate this functionality was custom developed in .NET.

WFS: What role did partners play?

RH: HP worked closely with partners during the nine months it took to move to the new Windows 2000 environment. Microsoft Services, in particular, played a key role, with employees from its Adelaide office working with the HP and WorkCover team.

WFS: All in all, successful?

RH: The successful delivery of the project has enabled WorkCover to move towards its next phase of delivering innovative solutions to their customers in South Australia. The new backend platform opened doors for the delivery of new Web-based services, increased business intelligence through the use of SQL’s OLAP cube data analysis technology and expanded options for integration with CRM solutions.

WFS: And economically?

RH: Running mainframes is very expensive. Moving to the Windows platform brought costs down significantly, provided a performance and capability increase, while still achieving the availability and stability requirements essential to a major insurance organization.

For more information, visit www.hp.com/go/fsi