City of Brussels

City of Brussels chooses Anubex for IT Modernization

Anubex, leader in automated software modernization, is pleased to announce it has been awarded a contract to migrate two software applications used by the city of Brussels. The deal is valued at about $1.3 million.

The two software applications manage the financial administration and the human resources of several of Brussels' municipal agencies. The applications have been in use for more than 15 years and today are used by several hundred people.

Technically, both software applications will be migrated from a BS2000 mainframe environment to Windows. The financial administration application (known as BRUFIN) will be migrated from IDMS on BS2000 and the human resources application (known as PERBRU) will be migrated from LEASY/UTM. Both applications will be converted to more modern technologies on Windows, including modern user interfaces in Java and relational databases in Oracle.

The character-based screens of both applications (developed with CA's MAP/C and with Fujitsu Siemens' IFG technology) will be consolidated and migrated to Java Swing and made accessible to users over the internet. 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 MAP/C and IFG screen technologies into a native Java drag-and-drop development environment within the Eclipse IDE. This will enable developers to re-use their current skills after the migration to incrementally enrich the mainframe screens with modernized features native to Java.

The migration will move some 1.5 million lines of code, 1,300 user-interface screens, and 7 GB of data to Windows. In order to maximize efficiency, the migrations of the two applications will be staged to overlap, with the BRUFIN application going live first in February 2009, and the PERBRU following in October of that same year. The project will be executed according to Anubex' iterative snapshot-oriented process called SOAR, and will involve experts from GIAL, the non-profit organization that acts as primary provider of IT services to the city of Brussels, Fujitsu Siemens and Rever.

According to Louis Heymans, Managing Director at Anubex, "Our tools will automate over 95% of the work needed to extract these applications from the mainframe, transform them to a Windows architecture, and retarget them to internet and RDBMS technologies. By combining these tools with the Anubex SOAR process, GIAL and the city of Brussels will be assured a seamless transition."

Mia Vermeir, Finance Director of the city of Brussels, justifies the migration through their need to work with up-to-date technologies (graphical user interface, data accessibility ...), the urgency to eliminate their technical dependence on the BS2000 platform and the savings that will be generated through a reduction in operational costs.

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