Deutsche Asset Management

Deutsche Asset Management is one of the world’s leading investment management organizations, bringing access to the world’s financial markets and delivering solutions to clients around the globe. The company represents the asset management activities conducted by Deutsche Bank AG and its subsidiaries. It offers individuals and institutions traditional and alternative investments across all major asset classes. The company has migrated its application portfolio from z/VSE and Adabas & Natural to .NET.

The Project

The company was looking for a solution to migrate from the older mainframe environment to a modern client server architecture. Following the business strategy of the company, the idea of the re-hosting and conversion was compared with other possible alternatives and chosen as the best approach. The project was implemented together with Astadia Europe (Anubex) and took 22 months to complete.

“We are very proud that we successfully delivered the largest project for this environment ever. After the successful migration of the last subsidiaries, the new environment is very stable and performs well. The business is running as usual which is the best outcome a project like this could have.” - Markus Kickertz, Vice President and Lead Application Manager of Deutsche Asset Management

Modernization and Cost Reduction

The migration of the mainframe system offered the bank the opportunity to move its mission-critical applications to a state-of-the-art architecture.

“Beside the cost reduction of about 4 million Euro per year, Deutsche Asset Management now has a modern platform and all future options." - Markus Kickertz, Vice President and Lead Application Manager of Deutsche Asset Management

Two mainframes and six subsidiaries were in scope, and the applications now run on a modern environment on a fully virtualized server platform. The mainframe z/VSE environment was re-hosted to a Windows Server environment. The JCL was replaced by PowerShell, and the Natural programs were converted to C#, while 5 terabytes of data were migrated from Adabas to SQL Server using Treehouse Software’s tools. Entire-X became COM.

“We are extremely happy that Deutsche Bank, after a detailed market study, entrusted us with this project, although we did not have a single reference yet for this particular technology mapping at that time. They recognized however our deep understanding and experience of migrations, and saw that we were best placed to deliver.” - Louis Heymans, Managing Director, Astadia

“We are very proud of the whole team that collaborated on this project, and I want to thank Anubex, since they went beyond mere migration and conversion work: they took ownership and were at our side during the entire project.” - Dietmar Dunkel, Program Manager at Deutsche Asset Management and responsible for the migration project

The Solution's 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 equivalent to the original application

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