By William Deason, Product Manager, IBM Systems, Enterprise Software
Solution
IT Infrastructure
Industry
Banking
Company
Among the largest banks in the United States, this customer provides retail and commercial banking, trust, stockbrokerage, and mortgage services.
Business challenge
Facing a costly renewal from Broadcom/CA for their entire software portfolio, the bank investigated alternatives for their storage, security, and development products. The objective was to find a lower-cost alternative for the CA Easytrieve license.
The bank found that IBM Migration Utility was the best-fit option for replacing CA Easytrieve. IBM Migration Utility would allow the bank to continue using their CA Easytrieve source programs, or optionally convert those programs to IBM Enterprise COBOL. The bank further found that IBM Migration Utility would provide the greatest flexibility, allowing them to maintain either the original Easytrieve statements or the generated IBM Enterprise COBOL based on the immediate business need. In the end, the bank would see a greatly reduced maintenance cost. As well, IBM Migration Utility would provide the same functionality as CA Easytrieve and would allow them to continue using their existing Easytrieve language skills and knowledge.
Transition
Planning for the CA Easytrieve replacement with IBM Migration Utility began at the end of October 2020. The plan included installation and customization to match the parameters used in their CA Easytrieve Options Table. Matching the parameters was paramount to facilitating accurate before-and-after testing, limiting any conversion rework, and maintaining the project timeline.
Beginning December 2020, an IBM Business Partner began Conversion and Education services, and at the same time, the customer began performing the Testing and Promotion processes. The IBM Business Partner used the IBM Migration Utility (IMU) Discovery Utility and libraries identified by the customer's development team, to identify Easytrieve programs, macros, and execution JCL. The IMU Discovery Utility copied the discovered artifacts to separate libraries for conversion, leaving the original libraries intact. The IMU Parallel Test and Comparison Utility was used to execute the original Easytrieve programs against the IMU-generated COBOL version of the Easytrieve program, compiled using IBM Enterprise COBOL.
Deployment
In September 2021, all conversion and manual remediation work had been completed, with more than 5000 Easytrieve programs processed and 9% of the converted programs requiring manual intervention.
This allowed the customer’s development teams to complete testing and promotion of the compiled versions of the programs. This testing was facilitated using special changes to JCL for testing their Easytrieve programs.
The CA Easytrieve license was removed from the customer's development and production environments in January 2022. Since then, all processing of Easytrieve code has been handled by IBM Migration Utility.
Results
Solution components
The IBM Solution consisted of the following IBM Migration Utility components:
- IMU Discovery Utility for finding Easytrieve programs and copying them to separate libraries for conversion
- IMU Translator for converting Easytrieve source programs to IBM Enterprise COBOL one at a time or en masse
- IMU Automated Parallel Test and Comparison Utility for running the original and the IBM Migration Utility-generated programs electronically comparing outputs to improve accuracy and verifying the converted programs
- IMU Runtime for running the IBM COBOL load modules
The following components were also used:
- IBM Enterprise COBOL for compiling the generated COBOL source programs
- Language Environment for running the COBOL load modules
Learn more about the product: Visit the product page