IDMS Migrations

IDMS, from Computer Associates, provided many large organisations with a powerful, stable and rapid development environment in which to build their mission critical applications. Decades later, many of those applications are still mission critical today, with literally thousands of man years of development invested in each of them. As 4GL runtime license costs escalate and IDMS related development skills decline, the Total Cost of Ownership for these systems has escalated beyond practicality. Organisations that are dependent upon systems such as these run the risk of becoming technologically trapped, unless an automated approach is taken to migrate them to modern, mainstream technology. Anubex' automated IDMS migrations shorten re-development and testing cyles, reduce costs and minimize risk. We have a perfect track record in delivering successful application migrations.

Product Highlights

The Anubex IDMS migration solution takes any application developed with CA IDMS technology and automatically converts it to a functionally identical application, ready to run within an alternative technical environment on the same platform, or on a different platform altogether. The migrated application is completely free of dependencies on CA IDMS technology and, instead, relies upon industry standard technologies.  

Three Firm Promises

All Anubex IDMS application migrations guarantee operational equivalence on three levels:

• Functional equivalence - the migrated application will behave identically to the original application.
• Performance equivalence - the migrated application will perform as well, or better, than the original application.
• Maintainability equivalence – ease of maintenance of the migrated application will be as good, or better, following the necessary cross-training of development staff, which is not extensive.

Native Technologies / No Emulation

Anubex understands the importance of positioning its clients in such a way as to open up the possibilities for the general modernization of their applications and infrastructure. Application migration is the first critical step towards achieving this goal and we consequently ensure that migrated applications always utilize technologies that are widely recognized and accepted as native, on the chosen target platform. This represents a distinct advantage, compared with solutions that merely emulate the source platform technologies on a new platform. Wherever our promise of functional equivalence may dictate the introduction of a component that could be considered as proprietary, we also provide a clearly defined modernization path, to facilitate the elimination of that component altogether.

Wide Choice of Target Technologies

Anubex IDMS migrations offer a wide choice when it comes to mapping source system technologies to the alternatives:

We are always looking to implement new options, whether by client request or as part of our ongoing monitoring of popular demand and general trends and developments within the software industry. Anubex also offers IBM and BS2000 platform migration products that provide solutions for the platform specifics, such as printing, security, scheduling & job control, data files etc.

User Interface Modernization

The Anubex Waxwing product enables the conversion of many legacy, character-based user interfaces, including CA-IDMS OLM maps, into modern, open Java or .NET based front-ends. These replacement interfaces can be maintained using standard development tools, such as Eclipse and Visual Studio.

Where Waxwing is deployed within a migrated application, the developers are then free to enhance the converted OLM Maps with graphical components such as drop-down fields, checkboxes and data lists. Even in situations where the customer chooses to retain the existing 3270 or 9750 terminal emulator, Waxwing still provides a modern, WYSISYG maintenance experience for the developer, working within Eclipse or Visual Studio. Under this partially limited scenario, Waxwing generates COBOL modules, which translate map data into proper 3270 or 9750 streams at runtime.

Automated Testing

Testing is a major and critical element of any migration project. The Anubex Automated Testing Framework offers the following, unique features and benefits:

• Avoids the need to manually create test scenarios
• Provides automated recording, replay and difference analysis
• Limits end-user involvement to acceptance testing
• Can also be used to great effect beyond the migration project

Further information is available within the - ATF Product Sheet

Migration Project Highlights

Over the course of the last fifteen years, Anubex has successfully migrated more than 50 enterprise scale legacy applications around the globe, with a 100% success rate! Aggregating these projects, Anubex tools have migrated in excess of 100 million lines of source code, and more than 150 terabytes of data. There are two keys to these successes:

• An absolute focus on automation, not only for our conversion tools, but also for the assessment and testing phases of a project
• A comprehensive project execution methodology

The following phases can be discerned in all Anubex migration projects. The two most important of these, the PMA and SOAR phases are also described in further detail:

Project Planning: PMA

Every Anubex migration project starts with a Pre-Migration Analysis (PMA). This PMA (or assessment as it is also called) is performed by Anubex migration specialists, in combination with the customer application specialists and management. During the PMA the analysis report produced by Anubex analysis tools is expanded into an appropriate level of detail, in order to construct a complete definition of the project scope. At the end of the PMA, Anubex consultants deliver a proposal for the migration project. This proposal comprises an analysis report, a quote and a detailed project plan.

Project Execution: SOAR

Migrating a large, business critical legacy application presents unique challenges. Finding a solution to the conflict between the ever-evolving business requirements of the legacy application on the one hand and the migration project on the other is one significant example of the type of challenges faced.

This particular challenge is one that is frequently identified too late in many migration projects. As a result, it is typically addressed by deploying a “mirrored maintenance” approach, where all modifications are duplicated in both environments. This inevitably generates an enormous, undesirable overhead, apart from the inevitable, additional technical issues that also arise.

Anubex has long recognized this problem and addresses it through its project execution methodology known as SOAR - Snapshot Oriented Automated Reduction. SOAR characteristics include:

• Division of a project into consecutive, ever shortening cycles, in which only source code changes are migrated and tested;
• Reliance upon automation to guarantee quality;
• Limitation of the code-freeze period to an absolute minimum;

The illustration below depicts SOAR applied in a project, with the relation between the migration (top) and development (bottom), leading up to D-DAY when the final data migration is executed.

Further information

Further information about our Migrations can be found on our Migrations Frequently Asked Questions page.

If you require additional information please contact us with your questions.