MetaWare completes mainframe migration at Swedish Social Insurance Agency

Försäkringskassan, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency contracted with Accenture and MetaWare to migrate their +9000 Cobol business program, running on the mainframe, to a more open and extensible IBM platform running AIX.

 

MetaWare, the mainframe modernization company, were contracted through Accenture to achieve this migration for Försäkringskassan. The 60% of the application portfolio running on the mainframe have been successfully migrated onto the AIX platform, after two year project now coming to completion with the switch-over occurring during December 2009.

“We are very proud to have completed such a large and complex program on time, on budget, with a pro-active customer as Försäkringskassan, with such a good team spirit.” says Benjamin Krongrad, Regional Sales Manager for MetaWare.

The obsolescence of the platform with the end-of-support, and the decrease in mainframe-skilled individuals have been the essential reasons to migrate to one more modern application platform.
In addition, the objective of the migration project was to gain application agility and flexibility by deploying the converted application in an open environment with a tiered architecture.

The Swedish Social Insurance Agency made the choice of a straight conversion from Cobol to Cobol on Unix/ Tuxedo/ Weblogic/ DB2 rather than re-write the Cobol applications in a java language.
“We had a real big bang in front of us, "says Stefan Olowsson, Forsäkringskassan, IT Director

MetaWare’s approach to migration projects is to minimize risks and lower migration costs by reaching a high level of automatization and precision with the Refine Migration Workbench. Refine© tool based transformation from MetaWare offers a unique, cost effective and zero-risk solution for migrating COBOL applications from mainframe platforms  to open systems or other mainframe platforms.

The Swedish Social Insurance achieved their objective of switch-over the 9000+ programs (6Mio LOC) converted application off the mainframe by December 2009.