Making the move off the mainframe via mainframe rehosting has enabled numerous customers to lower costs, and helped IT deliver greater business impact due to flexibility of the open systems environment and greater agility of the application services rehosted to an extensible, SOA-ready platform.
A key factor in a successful rehosting project is the application platform that combines proven ability to run mainframe applications without requiring invasive changes with the required performance, availability, and reliability, while making it simpler to SOA-enable and/or rearchitect selected components as needed.
Oracle’s rehosting solution for mainframe modernization provides a proven, low risk, and highly efficient way for enterprises to migrate critical online and batch applications off the mainframe to lower-cost open systems environment powered by Oracle Database and Oracle Tuxedo. The benefits of using this solution are summarized by contrasting the before and after IT environment in the table below.
CONTRASTING IT ENVIRONMENT BEFORE AND AFTER MAINFRAME REHOSTING
BEFORE REHOSTING AFTER REHOSTING
• 70-80 percent of IT budget spent on IBM and other mainframe costs and resources
• Proprietary and closed environment with shrinking skills base
• Costly and brittle integration of new applications, big drag on time-to-market
• Expensive to adapt to the needs of the business
• High level of backlog for mainframe application changes
• Ongoing annual cost savings of 50-80 percent compared to premigration maintenance costs
• Reduced or eliminated IBM and CA dependence and lock-in
• Increased agility—core enterprise assets are SOA-enabled for a standards-based and composition-driven assembly model
• Faster application changes with enhancements delivered by Java/.Net components transparently integrated with legacy COBOL code
• Funds and resources available for new initiatives, reducing backlog
This approach can accelerate the cost savings, shorten time to meaningful ROI, and substantially reduce legacy modernization risks. It balances the benefits of the powerful open systems-based platform and software stack with the low risk, non-invasive migration of the invaluable application logic and data. For many customers this represents an optimal first step in their modernization roadmap—an approach that quickly reduces costs and generates positive returns, and puts them on a solid financial and technological footing for further modernization
investments.
Substantial cost reductions have been achieved by many banks, insurers, manufacturing and service companies, as well as government organizations. A number of these customers have taken advantage of the flexibility of the new environment and rapid reuse of the rehosted application components to extend their applications using modern development paradigms, rich SOA integration options, and ability to easily integrate rehosted services with packaged
applications.
“This target architecture is CNAM’s first concrete step in component-based development. Functions are now reusable.
Development and Maintenance workload is reduced. Improved responsiveness and IT performance resulted in faster implementation of new features.”
Mme. Maryvonne Cronier, CIO, CNAM-TS
While the TCO reductions depend on many factors, such as the scope of the migration, complexity and scale of the rehosted applications, preferred target environment, etc. we can provide examples from past projects presented by customers at BEA World and Oracle OpenWorld.
MAINFRAME REHOSTING CUSTOMER EXAMPLES
PROJECT DESCRIPTION RESULTS
PG&E: A US gas and electric utility serving over 13M customers in Northern and Central California
PG&E has migrated CICS/COBOL/DB2-based Customer Care and Billing application suite to Oracle Tuxedo, WebLogic, and Oracle Database/RAC cluster. The suite provides applications handling:
• Measure, bill, collect processes to support meter reading
• Meter data management and rendering of bills,
• Customer records, credit and payment processing
• Contact Center and Front Counter Support for customer transactions such as start/stop and account status
• Scheduling and dispatch of customer field orders
The migration has enabled PG&E to:
• Scale the application dramatically to support PG&E SmartMeter™ rollout of 10.3 million new electric and gas meters that electronically report consumption daily or hourly. The transaction volume has scaled to 1 Billion select/fetch and 100 Million inserts/updates/deletes daily
• Gain performance improvements - 28% gain in batch processing and 25% improvement in online processing.
• Maintain their 7x24x365 uptime requirements
• Generate $5M in annual savings by reducing mainframe footprint significantly (from four mainframes with 13 processor down to single mainframe with one processor)
CNAM-TS: A Social Security organization handling health insurance claim processing for 50M members in France
CNAM-TS has migrated its 12,000 MIPS worth of mainframe applications responsible for processing 1.1B claims a year and issuing €110 Billion in reimbursement payments annually. They undertook IT consolidation and mainframe rehosting to reduce IT costs and increase agility in responding to regulatory changes in health care.
CNAM-TS rehosting project migrated 3,500 COBOL programs, 4,600 JCL jobs, and 270TB of data from two mainframe architectures (IBM and BULL) to a single architecture on open systems environment powered by Oracle Tuxedo and Oracle Database.
CNAM-TS benefits after mainframe rehosting:
• IT consolidation and simplification by rehosting mainframes to a more flexible open systems architecture
• Organizational transformation, which created the foundation for CNAM’s move to component-based development and enabled Java extensions to COBOL applications, contributing to IT skill evolution
• Reduction of daily processing by 8 hrs., which enabled introduction of smartcard services on the same systems
• Improved reliability/availability by deploying across multiple sites with horizontally distributed, replicated DB and load balancing via Tuxedo data-driven request routing
• Cost reduction from $65M a year down to $10M a year for 85% cost savings to deliver the same capabilities on an open systems infrastructure without the mainframe
Mainframe Rehosting Leveraging Oracle Tuxedo: Accelerating Cost Reduction and Application Modernization
June 2008, Updated March 2009 Author: Mark Rakhmilevich
Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A.
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