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MigrationWare has assisted Netherlands-based supermarket giant Ahold in successfully migrating its Human Resource Management (HRM) system off the mainframe onto a Unix platform as well as converting its DB2 database to Oracle.
João de Oliveira, MigrationWare Sales Director, says MigrationWare was contracted onto the project by European IT solutions company, Sogeti, because of its expertise in migrating COBOL applications off the mainframe.
“Ahold faced high operational costs in running its HRM system named MEDAH on a mainframe. Furthermore, it faced a large diversity of technologies and an application landscape with duplicate, non-standardized information.
“Ahold addressed these challenges by migrating its MEDAH system to a more cost effective Unix platform. The database management system was changed to Oracle, which is being used across the rest of the organisation, to improve standardisation. Furthermore, the process naming attributes within the database were changed towards the company-wide formats, to enable future integration of applications within Ahold,” he says.
Norbert Mimpen, Sogeti project manager, says Sogeti chose MigrationWare to assist on the project because of its excellent tools for such migrations and the fact that it has a proven track record on other migration projects around the world.
Mimpen says the MEDAH system was migrated from the DB2/3270 platform to a Unix-based COBOL/Oracle environment.
“Given that MEDAH controlled all information of all of Ahold’s personnel, it made sense to continue to utilise the system and not re-write it from scratch in another development language. The Unix platform was chosen because it significantly reduced operating costs for Ahold as well as providing a noticeable performance improvement,” he says.
Klaas Simons, Ahold project sponsor says while the company does not have any direct figures, the aim of the project was to create an environment on which the Human Resource domain could be further developed.
“Initially Ahold looked for a package solution as well as examining a migration solution from Mainframe to Unix for the existing system,” he says. “The cost of the migration solution was 70 percent cheaper than the package implementation and was realized in a third of the time.”
Furthermore, Simons says package implementation would have required one to two years of solving IT and Business changes required as a result of the new implementation.
“A migration enabled us to add new functionality much faster, like the addition of other ‘SOA like’ packages. The costs of running the mainframe are also much higher than the costs of running a Unix platform. Ahold probably achieved a 25 percent cost saving with a bigger pool of knowledge and experience available from industry to support the platform.”
In total, De Oliveira says MigrationWare migrated 240 applications from the mainframe to the Unix-based environment.
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