Air France Industries

Air France Industries Selects Anubex to Modernize Software Applications

Anubex, leader in enterprise application modernization, is pleased to announce it has been awarded a contract to migrate and modernize software used by Air France Industries, the aircraft maintenance division of Air France. The deal is valued at over $750 000. 

The software application in question is used by Air France Industries exclusively in the maintenance of the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) belonging to the French Air Force (Armée de l'Air). The application has 400 users, and has been in production since the early 90s.

The project will be executed jointly by approximately 20 professionals from Anubex, Air France Industries, and the French Air Force. Under the agreement, Anubex will provide tooling to automate the technical migration of the software to Windows. The project is scheduled for completion in June of 2009.

Technically, the applications will be migrated from a Wang Pace environment to a modernized infrastructure consisting of Windows Server, an Oracle database, and web-based user interfaces. The new software will be maintained in a mixture of COBOL and Java. All character-based screens will be converted to Java Swing and undergo a light upgrade of their look and feel to the customer's current standards.

Making this transition possible is a combination of Anubex' own Swing-based Waxwing components and Instantiations' Swing Designer™. Together these tools combine the rich semantics of the older Wang and Wang Pace screen technologies into a native Java drag-and-drop development environment within the Eclipse IDE. These two tools will enable the current developers to re-use their skills after the migration to incrementally enrich the screens with modernized features native to Java.

The applications contain about 5000 programs and manage close to 1GB of data.

According to Louis Heymans, Managing Director at Anubex, "We are excited to be working together with the team Air France Industries on this modernization project. Software development and especially our own Pace migration have come a long way since Air France first put the applications into production. The Anubex migration toolkit for Pace has gained tremendously in sophistication the past ten years, and we are looking forward to a smooth transition in 2009."

About Air France Industries
Since it was founded in 1933, Air France has always chosen to maintain its own aircraft while guaranteeing compliance with strict imperatives such as safeguarding air safety, enhanced management of aircraft operation, and cost containment.

Air France Industries is the brand under which Air France sells its aircraft maintenance services to other airlines worldwide. With 15 000 employees, Air France Industries and KLM Engineering & Maintenance make a turnover of close to 3 billion euros. Its technical excellence and the sheer quality of its products and services are proclaimed in its logo and in the values it reflects, including attentiveness, flexibility, operating know-how, rigour, and commitment to improvement.