IDMS migration for Swets

Swets finds the last piece of its standardization puzzle in migration partnership with Anubex

Swets, the world's leading subscription services company and Anubex, leader in automated application modernization solutions, are pleased to announce a partnership in which Anubex will perform the cross-platform migration of an enterprise application of Swets. The project will involve the conversion, migration, and modernization of the final back end application of Swets, which was developed with IDMS technology.

Swets has been active in the information industry for over 100 years and has managed to remain at the forefront of that industry thanks to its ability to develop and create innovative solutions that meet its customers demands "In the past few years, our SwetsWise portfolio of products and services has revolutionized the way that subscriptions can be managed and maintained," said Johan van Campen, Chief Operations and Information officer at Swets. "This contract with Anubex is the last step for us in aligning our IT systems, as it concludes the migration of all our applications to a modern IT infrastructure, similar to the one on which SwetsWise already operates. Once this remaining system has been migrated, we will have in place the more flexible and adaptable environment needed to enable us to continue with our ambitious development cycle and create ever more dynamic and extensive applications, cementing our position as the industry's pioneering leader in subscription services."

Using tools from the Anubex migration toolkit, the company will migrate an extensive number of lines of code, residing in batch and interactive programs and scripts, and a substantial amount of production data. The application will be migrated to a new architecture consisting of a combination of COBOL and Java, running on Linux, which will facilitate the integration with other applications running on the same architecture. The firm's data, currently stored in a pre-relational network model will be migrated to a fully relational model and re-implemented on DB2 UDB. Character-based screens will be migrated to rich Java interfaces where they will be maintained after the migration in Eclipse with Instantiations™ SwingBuilder.

Anubex will collaborate with the IT team from Swets to complete the migration, testing, and taking live of the applications. The migration is slated for completion in the summer of 2009 and will be conducted according to SOAR, the snapshot-oriented migration process perfected by Anubex since 1993. To completely eliminate risk, business disruption and code freeze periods, the applications will be migrated and tested iteratively throughout the project and taken live in one single step.

With the migration being supported by the same in-house staff that maintain and operate the application today, Swets will leverage technical and functional expertise toward the target platform. Swets has extensive in-house expertise in Java and Linux already in place. Worldwide, the application in question is accessed by over twenty Swets offices, located in several countries throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

Belgian Anubex has developed specific tools to improve the precision and speed with which IDMS applications can be migrated to modern open systems. "This project represents our largest contract to date in the Netherlands," said Louis Heymans, Managing Director of Anubex. "We see renewed interest among members of shrinking user-bases of technologies like IDMS to modernize their applications. By choosing a migration solution, Swets will gain a competitive edge by leveraging its past investment in human and electronic capital while reaping the benefits of a completely refreshed and up-to-date enterprise architecture."

Recently, the Belgian company has completed similar migrations for several banks, insurance firms, and government agencies throughout Europe.

About Swets
Swets is the world's leading subscription services company. We build on more than 100 years of experience to maximize the return on investments in time and money for clients and publishers in today's complex information marketplace. With clients in over 160 countries and more than twenty offices around the world, Swets is a true "long tail" powerhouse that provides the most comprehensive and sophisticated e-commerce platform currently available in its field.

Swets has been included in E-Content Magazine's "100 Companies that Matter Most in the Digital Content Industry" for the past five years, and consistently features in the top 25% of FEM Business' "Top 500 Companies in The Netherlands" list year after year. We are the only subscription services company that is ISO 9001:2000 certified on a global basis for 10 years running--a testament to our stringent operation and client service procedures.
 

http://pers.newsengine.be/Pride.nsf/0/3C1F9D9585418C32C125745600343BED?O...

http://pers.newsengine.be/Pride.nsf/0/73394C8BF66C8EB2C125745600348BFA?O...