Bank J. Van Breda

The Belgian bank Bank J.Van Breda & C° has completed the migration of its mission-critical Car Finance application from z/VSE with CICS and VSAM to .Net. Van Breda Car Finance is a 100% owned subsidiary of Bank J.Van Breda & C°, specialized in car financing and car leasing, offering fast credit solutions to its clients.

The application serves about 1,500 external users and car dealers, across the country, and covers all aspects of the business. The migration of the mainframe system offered the bank the opportunity to move this mission-critical application to a state-of-the-art architecture, ready for deployment in a private or even the public cloud, if the need would arise. The company selected Astadia Europe (Anubex) to execute the migration.

“The whole team did a fantastic job, but I would like to express my respect for the Anubex team and their tools, especially for their help with testing, and for their assistance in tuning the performance of the migrated application on the new platform. This project presented a big technical challenge, but after all, that is why we chose Anubex in the first place.” - Marc Wijnants, CIO at Bank J.Van Breda.

> Learn more about Astadia's z/OS & z/VSE migration solutions

The Project

The application comprises about 1.1M lines of COBOL code in total, and 885 screens. It was using 10 gigabytes of data that were managed on the mainframe in VSAM files. The programs made extensive use of transaction processing, internet access, and batch environments of the mainframe. The Astadia's tools insured an automation rate of 99.99% of the migration phase.

According to Marc Wijnants, the bank’s CIO, who initiated and oversaw the project, the mainframe applications fully addressed the needs of the business for many years: "The migration let us preserve the investment in the existing system, while adding value by moving it to a scalable, open environment.”

The target system runs on a modern environment with a SQL Server database, and COBOL application servers on a fully virtualized Windows Server platform. The developers are now using “drag and drop” gestures to maintain the migrated code in a standard Visual Studio IDE which the bank also hosts on a virtual desktop infrastructure.

IBM z/VSE Migration

Having extensive experience with BS2000/ODS and z/OS, Astadia took on the challenge to help its customer migrate away from z/VSE with CICS and DMS panels, in a fully automated way.

“We extended our migration toolset to cover the z/VSE architecture, as well as our testing tool. From now on, we are fully equipped to help z/VSE customers unlock their applications and run them on the most modern environments.” - Louis Heymans, Managing Director, Anubex

The Benefits

Some of the benefits of the methodology and the migration and testing tools we used include:

• Minimal risks  
• Minimal change management
• No business interruption
• Project with a short duration
• No user re-training, as the migrated application is functionally equivallent to the original application

Need advice on your digital transformation project? Get in touch with our experts and learn how we can help your organization migrate business applications in a seamless, automated process.

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