CA IDMS/DB & CA ADS Migrations

CA IDMS from Broadcom provided many large organizations with a powerful, stable and rapid development environment in which to build their mission critical applications. Decades later, many of those applications are still mission critical today, with literally thousands of man years of development invested in each of them. As 4GL runtime license costs increase and CA IDMS related development skills decline, the Total Cost of Ownership for these systems has escalated beyond practicality.

Organisations that are dependent upon systems such as these run the risk of becoming technologically trapped, unless an automated approach is taken to migrate them to modern, mainstream technology. Anubex' automated CA IDMS migrations shorten re-development and testing cyles, reduce costs and minimize risk. We have a perfect track record in delivering successful CA IDMS application migrations.

Solution Highlights

The Anubex CA IDMS migration solution takes any application developed with CA IDMS technology and automatically converts it to a functionally identical application, ready to run within an alternative technical environment on the same platform, or on a different platform altogether. The migrated application is completely free of dependencies on CA IDMS technology and, instead, relies upon industry standard technologies.

Native Technologies / No Emulation

Anubex understands the importance of positioning its clients in such a way as to open up the possibilities for the general modernization of their applications and infrastructure. Application migration is the first critical step towards achieving this goal and we consequently ensure that migrated applications always utilize technologies that are widely recognized and accepted as native, on the chosen target platform.

This represents a distinct advantage, compared with CA-IDMS conversion solutions that merely emulate the source platform technologies on a new platform. Wherever our promise of functional equivalence may dictate the introduction of a component that could be considered as proprietary, we also provide a clearly defined modernization path, to facilitate the elimination of that component altogether.

Wide Choice of Target Technologies

Anubex CA IDMS migrations offer a wide choice when it comes to mapping source system technologies to the alternatives:

We are always looking to implement new options, whether by client request or as part of our ongoing monitoring of popular demand and general trends and developments within the software industry. Anubex also offers Adabas-Natural, COBOL, IBM and BS2000 platform migration products that provide solutions for the platform specifics, such as printing, security, scheduling & job control, and data files.

Automated Testing

Testing is a major and critical element of any migration project. Our Anubex TestMatch product offers the following, unique features and benefits:

• Avoids the need to manually create test scenarios
• Provides automated recording, replay and difference analysis
• Limits end-user involvement to acceptance testing
• Can also be used to great effect beyond the migration project

Further information is available within the TestMatch Fact Sheet.

Migration Project Highlights

Over the course of the last fifteen years, Anubex has successfully migrated more than 50 enterprise scale legacy applications around the globe, with a 100% success rate! Aggregating these conversion projects, Anubex tools have migrated in excess of 100 million lines of source code, and more than 150 terabytes of data. There are two keys to these successes:

• An absolute focus on automation, not only for our conversion tools, but also for the assessment and testing phases of a project
• A comprehensive project execution methodology

The following phases can be discerned in all Anubex migration projects. The two most important of these, the PMA and Migratonomy phases are also described in further detail:

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Every Anubex migration project starts with a Pre-Migration Analysis (PMA). This PMA is performed by Anubex migration specialists together with the client’s experts and management. The asessment produced with the help of our analysis tools is then expanded into an appropriate level of detail, in order to construct a complete definition of the project scope. At the end of the PMA, we are able to deliver a full proposal for the migration project. This proposal comprises an analysis report, a quote, and a detailed project plan.

Project Execution: Migratonomy

Migrating a large, business critical legacy application presents unique challenges. Finding a solution to the conflict between the ever-evolving business requirements of the legacy application on the one hand and the migration project on the other is one significant example of the type of challenges faced.

This particular challenge is one that is frequently identified too late in many migration projects. As a result, it is typically addressed by deploying a “mirrored maintenance” approach, where all modifications are duplicated in both environments. This inevitably generates an enormous, undesirable overhead, apart from the inevitable, additional technical issues that also arise.

Anubex has long recognized this problem and addresses it through its project execution methodology known as MIgratonomy. Its characteristics include:

• Division of a project into consecutive, ever shortening cycles, in which only source code changes are migrated and tested;
• Reliance upon automation to guarantee quality;
• Limitation of the code-freeze period to an absolute minimum;

Learn more about Anubex's Migratonomy methodology

• Migratonomy Research Paper

References

Anubex has a 100% success rate, having completed numerous CA IDMS/DB conversion and modernization projects around the globe. Each of these CA IDMS transformation projects has been delivered on time, within budget and to the complete satisfaction of the client.