A National Railway Freight System

Overview

A European national railway system delivers passenger service and freight services to citizens throughout their own country, and to destinations in several neighboring nations. Until recently, they operated their mission-critical freight management applications on an aging mainframe system.

The application in question is used to coordinate switching operations to assemble and disassembly freight trains, to process operational information about trains at border crossings, and to share vital information with other railway systems and operational partners. The organization boasts uptime of well over 99.9%, which is essential to ensure smooth freight operations on one of Europe’s largest nationwide railway systems.

When IT leaders in the organization recognized that it was time to modernize, they called upon Astadia, who had helped them with previous mainframe modernization efforts.

Challenge

IT leaders at the railway had long recognized the need to move away from reliance on their mainframe systems. In this case, they were running applications written in Natural, sitting atop an Adabas database. In addition, the organization had JCL code running on the mainframe.

It had become increasingly challenging to hire personnel with experience in those technologies, as a generation of mainframe experts reached retirement age. As they competed for a shrinking pool of mainframe talent, the organization saw its associated personnel costs escalate year after year.

They also faced rising operating costs, with little expectation that their core platform would keep up with the changing technology landscape. Lastly, they understood that in order to innovate and extend their services and functionality, they would need stronger, more agile integration technology. Unfortunately, their legacy systems were a barrier to the kind of innovation they envisioned.

The IT team were familiar with Astadia’s FastTrack Migration Factory, and had worked with the company in the past. They understood that Astadia’s unique approach offered a better, faster, more cost-effective means of modernizing their system. Because they had already seen it in action, they also understood that the Migration Factory could reduce their project risk dramatically, offering them very high confidence in a smooth transition and positive results.

Solution

IT leaders at the railway system wanted to convert their critical application code to Java, which would open up a broad tool of skilled developers, alleviating their acute talent shortage. They also wanted to move to a modern relational database, choosing PostgreSQL as their new platform of choice.

IT leaders chose to roll the project out in two phases, starting with the replacement of native mainframe technology with modern cloud-capable alternatives. This primarily impacted interfaces to partner processes, as well as infrastructure services like decentralized printing and user. 

Phase two involved migrating the mission-critical applications to the AWS cloud. Using the FastTrack Migration Factory, Astadia helped the organization to fully automate their database migration and code conversion processes. Astadia’s automated tools helped them migrate the database, modify and convert their Natural code to Java, and to thoroughly test the new system to ensure it delivered on the organization’s expectations for performance and functional equivalence. Astadia helped to convert the JCL code as well, streamlining and modernizing their systems further.

Results

Astadia successfully completed the project on time and within budget. Notably, the cutover time to the new cloud-based application was a mere six hours. The railway system successfully rolled out their “big bang” migration with virtually no interruption, and with everything operating smoothly from day one.

The organization has dramatically reduced costs, achieving an estimated €1.5 million in savings per year on operating costs. They can now draw from a substantially larger pool of skilled developers, reducing costs even further, and opening the door for innovation and improved agility. The organization has adopted a DevOps approach to help them innovate faster and deliver even greater benefits to the railway and its customers throughout Europe.

Having already proven the value of the FastTrack methodology and the Migration Factory approach, Astadia’s team had the confidence and support of IT leaders at the railway. They were not disappointed, as Astadia exceeded expectations and shepherded the organization through an exceptionally smooth transition to the cloud.

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Additional resources

Mainframe Modernization: The Key to Unleashing Digital Transformation

4 Keys to Successful Mainframe Modernization

Navigating Mainframe Modernization: Insights from Industry Experts