Anubex Migrates Swets’ IDMS Apps from Mainframe to Linux

Swets, the leading international subscription services company and Anubex, leader in automated application modernization, are pleased to announce the successful conclusion of a two-year cross-platform migration of one of Swets’ enterprise applications. The project, which was executed by Anubex in collaboration with the Swets IT organization, involved the conversion, migration, and modernization of Swets’ last remaining back-end application developed with IDMS technology.
The application in question is accessed by over twenty Swets offices, located in several countries throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
 

“This important project concludes the migration of all our applications to a modern IT infrastructure. Aligning our IT systems, both internal and external, in this way will enable us to accelerate our ambitious development plans and create ever more dynamic and flexible applications in the future.”

The application in question is accessed by over twenty Swets offices, located in several countries throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

“We would like to thank Anubex for all their hard work, support, and dedication throughout this project,” said Johan van Campen, Chief Information and Operations Officer at Swets. “This important project concludes the migration of all our applications to a modern IT infrastructure. Aligning our IT systems, both internal and external, in this way will enable us to accelerate our ambitious development plans and create ever more dynamic and flexible applications in the future.”

Louis Heymans, CEO of Anubex said, “The combination of support from Swets management, the commitment and spirit of both teams, the expertise of the specialists of both parties, and the migration tools and migration approach of Anubex have all played their part in the success of this project.”

Technically, the project involved the conversion of all IDMS and mainframe artifacts using the conversion tooling of Anubex. For IDMS these included ADSA structures, ADSO dialogs, OLM screens, DC and batch programs, code and edit tables, and the data dictionary.

Other mainframe sources included numerous scripts in JCL, REXX, and CLIST; COBOL and Assembler programs; and ISPF panels – all in all good for some 1.5 million lines of code. On the target, COBOL replaced mainframe COBOL, Assembler, and ADS; while Perl was used for all scripting. Swets replaced the IDMS DB component by DB2 on Linux.

According to Tony Van der Beken, Project Manager at Anubex, “Our tests show the system’s 450 concurrent users running their converted applications with server response times that match those of their mainframe. Batch programs execute faster than before and stress tests show that the current infrastructure is able to support over 2000 users without the use of a TP Monitor, including the existing Citrix Farms that still use the same system resources.”

The application has been migrated to a new architecture consisting of both COBOL and Java, running on Red Hat Linux, which will enable an easier and more stable integration with other applications running in the Swets data centers.

In the new environment the developers now maintain programs and maps in a modern Eclipse environment. While the migration emphasizes 1:1 functional equivalence, the tools and techniques from Anubex will make it possible for Swets to perform incremental modernization of the migrated applications and incremental enrichment of its user interfaces, should they decide to implement them.
The migration was conducted according to SOAR, the snapshot-oriented migration process perfected by Anubex since 1993.

About Anubex
Anubex provides solutions for the modernization of large and complex legacy applications for business and government organizations alike. Anubex exclusively applies a proven methodology and specialized software to optimally re-use the value in existing applications while automatically transforming them to use the most leading-edge technologies. Several of its customers are ranked among the Fortune Global 500. Anubex was incorporated in 1988 and is headquartered in Antwerp (Belgium) with an office in Sacramento (USA).