Anubex succesfully completes Natural Adabas migration for Fortis Bank Brokerage
28 Jun, 2005
During the weekend of 16th – 17th April 2005, the bank insurance applications of FB Brokerage were successfully migrated from a Siemens BS2000 mainframe to an NT-platform. Anubex had won the migration project on 31 March 2004, and completed it in 12 months and 10 days.
Strategic background of the project
The IT-team of FB Brokerage started the development of bank insurance applications in Natural-Adabas on a Siemens BS2000 mainframe in 1996. Ever since the founding of Fortis, the bank insurance activities had been reduced to run-off activities. Consequently, all developments on this platform were halted.
The development environment (Siemens BS2000 mainframe and Software AG Natural/Adabas) no longer provided an added value for the company, making the high costs of hard- and software unjustifiable.
“We chose Anubex”, explains C. Deman, consultant for FB Brokerage. “because their extensive experience in migrating applications to modern platforms, using their own tools, made it possible to automate the conversion.”
“These concerns obliged FB Brokerage to simplify and standardise the technological infrastructure. We searched for a solution to migrate the bank insurance applications to the Windows NT-platform, which was already being used by all our other applications”, says Danielle Laforce, IT-manager at FB Brokerage.
“The duration of the migration, the limited amount of developers, the complexity of the application and the reduced number of users, forced us to move towards a solution that would allows us to migrate without having to redevelop the applications.”
“We chose Anubex”, explains C. Deman, consultant for FB Brokerage. “because their extensive experience in migrating applications to modern platforms, using their own tools, made it possible to automate the conversion.”
The Anubex migration method has many benefits, including:
- Minimal risks
- Minimal change management
- No business interruption
- Project with a short duration
- No user re-training, as the migrated application retains all its functionality.
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, with a delivery date of the end of March 2005. FB Brokerage was to provide the test scenarios for the migrated application.
During the migration project, two FB Brokerage developers were temporarily assigned to the migration team, to assist with the migration of approximately 2,000 Natural programs.
Anubex also converted the 50 GigaByte Adabas database to Microsoft SQL Server, with the assistance of an FB Brokerage IT person.
The data migration was largely automated. Seventy percent 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.
During the testing, the Anubex migration tool was tuned and expanded to allow for maximum coverage of the Natural and Adabas syntax. Thanks to the effort and competence of the Anubex specialists, and the solid collaboration with the FB Brokerage team members, the acceptance tests were successfully completed after three months.
About FB Brokerage
FB Brokerage: the Insurance Broker of Fortis Bank.
FB Brokerage is an insurance broker, which mainly offers its services to customers of Fortis Bank.
The day-to-day business of FB Brokerage consist of:
- Management of the bank insurances portfolio of the former Generale Bank;
- Management and development of the brokerage portfolios for private persons and companies, which result from the merger between the former TCD and ACIV.
- Finding custom-made solutions for new clients, supplied through IPS, MEC and Private Banking of Fortis Bank, as well as other channels.
- FB Brokerage is a 100% affiliate of FB Verzekeringen, which is an affiliate of Fortis Bank. FB Brokerage was established to fulfil the needs of its clients and the above-mentioned business.
More information can be found on-line at www.fbbrokerage.be.
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