Luxury and Commercial Automotive Company

Overview

This client’s brand is synonymous with luxury, elegance, and innovation in the automotive world. Renowned for its meticulous craftsmanship, cutting-edge technology, and a rich heritage dating back to the invention of the automobile, the company embodies prestige and performance, setting the standard for luxury vehicles worldwide.

The company’s commitment to engineering excellence carries over to its IT systems as well. The team values reliability and innovation, and they apply that ethos to everything they do.

For years, the company has run mainframe systems, with the IDMS database and COBOL-based applications serving as the backbone of their operations. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hire employees with the right skills, however, and the company struggled to efficiently integrate their mainframe systems with modern platforms. The rising costs of the platform also proved to be a challenge.

When IT leaders in the organization recognized that it was time to modernize, Astadia stepped in to provide expert support and ensure a smooth modernization process.

Challenge

IT leaders at the company recognized that an important first step toward modernization involved migrating to a relational database and transforming their mainframe application code. They were running an IDMS database, with applications and batch jobs written in COBOL, ADS, and IDMS-DC.

Many company insiders were skeptical that the project could be completed successfully, though. Some even expressed the view that mainframe modernization was simply not achievable. Several years earlier, the company had attempted an automated mainframe modernization project, with very disappointing results.

The IT team set out to learn more about the Astadia FastTrack Migration Factory, skeptical that automated mainframe modernization was even possible. The team ultimately came to understand that Astadia’s approach could deliver what they needed.

Solution

The company valued the power and reliability of their mainframe systems, but knew that a modern relational database would better serve their needs, especially with respect to integration with external systems. They chose to migrate their Broadcom IDMS network model database to IBM DB2. They opted to stick with their Enterprise COBOL applications, but wanted to modernize and streamline their code, doing away with ADS and IDMS-DC altogether.

Using the FastTrack Migration Factory, Astadia helped the company to fully automate their database migration and code transformation processes. Astadia’s automated tools helped them migrate the database, modify and transform their Enterprise COBOL code, and exhaustively test the new system to make sure everything was working properly. Astadia helped to transform ADS and IDMS-DC code, streamlining and modernizing their systems further.

Results

Astadia successfully completed the project in 19 months, modernizing the client’s systems to make integration and innovation faster, easier, and less expensive.

Contrary to the doubts of many within the organization, everything worked as promised. Many of the IT veterans at the company had remained skeptical right up until go-live. Nevertheless, the cutover went off without a hitch. The company’s modernized mainframe system worked flawlessly. To the surprise of skeptics, it continued to run flawlessly, delivering perfect functional equivalence and meeting all performance targets.

Having successfully modernized on the mainframe, our client can tap into a larger pool of skilled IT workers, delivering rapid innovation that benefits the company and their customers around the globe.

Astadia’s ability to surpass expectations and prove the value of the FastTrack Migration Factory has led the company to consider new possibilities for modernization.