Agallis

‍

‍

Agallis is a financial company providing insurance services and products for companies and individuals The bank insurance applications of Agallis were successfully migrated from a mainframe to a Windows platform in 12 months and 10 days.

The IT team of Agallis started the development of bank insurance applications in Adabas-Natural on a BS2000/OSD mainframe in 1996. In the early 2000’s, the bank insurance activities had been reduced to run-off activities. Consequently, all developments on this platform were halted.

The Challenge

The development environment (BS2000/OSD mainframe and Adabas-Natural) no longer provided an added value for the company, making the high costs of the IT infrastructure and software unjustifiable.

“These concerns obliged Agallis to simplify and standardize the technological infrastructure. We searched for a solution to migrate the bank insurance applications to the Windows platform, which was already being used by all our other applications” - Danielle Laforce, IT-manager at Agallis.

The usual duration of a migration process, the limited amount of developers, the complexity of the application and the reduced number of users were other factors that influenced the decision to find a solution that would allow migrating without having to redevelop the application. Astadia Europe (Anubex) was selected to execute the migration.

The Project

Target Environment Micro Focus COBOL was chosen as the new development language. “Most of our IT staff have previous experience with COBOL. Our Adabas database was implemented in Microsoft SQL Server, conform to our other applications, requiring a minimum of additional training”, says C. Deman. The original estimate of the project duration was 12 months.  

Agallis provided the test scenarios for the migrated application. During the migration project, two Agallis developers were temporarily assigned to the migration team, to assist with the migration of approximately 2,000 Natural programs. Astadia also converted the 50 GigaByte Adabas database to Microsoft SQL Server, with the assistance of an Agallis IT specialist.

70% of the work was done during the night, assuring that the data migration could be finished within 24 hours.

The data migration was largely automated. 70% of the work was done unattended during the night, assuring that the data migration could be finished within 24 hours. Three proof runs of the data migration scenario were done in advance, so that the actual data migration became a routine job.

Learn more about the automated migration and testing tools we use in digital transformation projects >

During the testing, the Astadia migration tools were tuned and expanded to allow for maximum coverage of the Natural and Adabas syntax. Thanks to the automated process and the solid collaboration with the Agallis team members, the acceptance tests were successfully completed after three months.

The Benefits

Some of the benefits of our approach and tools include:

• Minimal risks  
• Minimal change management
• No business interruption
• Project with a short duration
• No user re-training, as the migrated application retains its functionality

Get in touch with our experts to learn how we help organizations transform their legacy applications in a seamless, automated process.