SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - June 05, 2014) - BluePhoenix (www.bphx.com) (
Doing business in over 40 countries, Arvato provides outsourcing services for customer outreach and loyalty programs, IT management, financial transactions and logistics. "Arvato chose BluePhoenix's automated application modernization solution to save time and get fully maintainable Java output," explains Reinhard Wetzel, CEO of Antavent Solutions, a BluePhoenix partner in Germany.
Modernizing with BluePhoenix enabled Arvato to:
- Keep the proven business logic and functionality of their legacy application intact
- Get to market faster with new software features and versions
- Reduce cost of maintaining legacy software and related platforms
- Increase the addressable market for software by making it easier to integrate into modern IT environments
"Our partnership with Antavent has accelerated our success in the German market," adds Rick Oppedisano, vice president of Global R&D and Marketing at BluePhoenix. "Their team excels at finding ways to make IT more efficient. With Arvato, that meant eliminating dual maintenance scenarios in core applications. Application conversion from COBOL to Java will enable integration, cost savings and better efficiency for managing the software lifecycle."
Project Best Practices and Lessons Learned
When evaluating applications for migration, size is one of the factors to be considered, but not always the most important one. Larger volumes of homogeneous, single-language lines of code are less problematic than smaller volumes of heterogeneous, multi-language systems. A single application that may have many lines of code but supports few transactions or batch jobs is easier to migrate than the alternative. Understanding the size, as defined by these various components, provides some insight not only into the size of infrastructure necessary to support this workload, but also into the migration options that are the easiest to perform.
Arvato leveraged BluePhoenix's Legacy Forensics service to document these factors, as well as remediate risk factors in the legacy application code itself. This service leverages automated technology to document the complex relationships within the legacy application and identify "dead code", syntax that is no longer functional or necessary. "In an automated conversion, minimizing the amount of bugs is critical to keeping project timelines and costs on plan," says Oppedisano. "Removing dead code can dramatically reduce the number of bugs found in the source application, enabling a faster conversion and cleaner code in the converted application."
"Bite-Size Chunks"
"Mainframe migrations have a cultural aspect that can't be ignored," says Oppedisano. "While there's an obvious technical impact, the impact on people and the processes they use to deliver and operate applications is also significant."
"We offer companies the option to modernize incrementally, in what we call 'bite-size chunks.' For example, we can start with integrating their legacy database with the target modern environment. This avoids the time and risk of migration, gives the business what it wants and takes some of the pressure off the application teams. If the objective is to maximize cost savings in a non-disruptive way, we have technology that can run batch processing off the mainframe. Then of course, we have the automated conversion technology when it's time for a migration. The goal is to provide value at each step of the application modernization process, so even if the customer has to stop or change, positive gains have been made."
Modernization Activity Increasing Worldwide
BluePhoenix enjoyed a busy second quarter, highlighted by project completion, new business and positive customer feedback. Recently, BluePhoenix:
- Agreed to terms with New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to modernize a payroll management application from COBOL to Java; read more about this project here.
- Completed a project in Spain for global banking giant BBVA; project detail can be read here.
- Agreed to terms with Xerox to modernize a complex COBOL application to Java
- Received positive affirmation of converted PL/I application success with Canada's Loto Quebec; more information on this project available here.
About BluePhoenix Solutions
BluePhoenix Solutions Ltd. (
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Contact Information:
Contact:
Rick Oppedisano
VP of Global R&D and Marketing
ricko@bphx.com