Anubex migrates mainframe of Belgium's largest health insurer

Anubex is pleased to announce it succeeded in migrating all mainframe databases of LCM, Belgium's largest health insurer, during the New Years weekend starting the year 2008. The databases contain data on nearly half of the population of Belgium. The migration was completed in close collaboration with LCM's IT department and involved over 30TB of data and 9MLOC (million lines of code) of program code. With the migration completed, LCM is now equipped with a flexible information system that will allow the company to better adapt to the evolving needs of its users and customers. This is the largest project ever executed by Anubex and it has attracted international interest.

The migration is a part of an ongoing initiative from LCM to improve the use of their information systems by modernising their classic mainframe application environment. The challenge lay in reproducing the functionality and especially the performance of the applications optimised for the BS2000/OSD mainframe, on an HP/UX environment with an Oracle database. LCM made its choice of Anubex as a migration partner after Anubex completed a proof of concept demonstrating the equivalence of the applications on a Unix/Oracle target. Anubex was the only company able to fully reproduce and even beat the performance of the mainframe applications in the POC.

Anubex and the LCM IT department worked together to complete the final migration stage during a weekend. On Friday, 4500 LCM staff were using programs running on the BS2000 mainframe, and when business resumed the next working day, all operations continued but then on a HP/UX Unix system. The work that took place that weekend was the result of over two years of preparation, simulation, and testing. The time was also necessary to perfect the many interfaces with external systems, such as the Belgian Crossroads Bank for Social Security. Anubex' role during this time was to provide the suitable migration methodologies, conversion tooling, developer libraries, and utilities.

'The successful migration is the result of the exceptional efforts of the IT team of LCM and the high-performance migration process, which was almost fully automated thanks to the conversion tools of Anubex,' according to Louis Heymans, Managing Director of Anubex.

'The strength of Anubex lies in its wealth of experience in migration. Anubex experts are great team players and work together efficiently to find solutions for complex migrations. With such amounts of data, it was crucial to us that nothing would get lost. And in this Anubex has succeeded,' confirmed Alain Conrath, CIO at LCM.

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