Electricity giant Eskom is currently assisting the Swaziland Government in ensuring its electricity billing system is Year 2000 compliant. The billing system, developed in-house by Eskom through application development software from SPL, is extremely flexible, being ported from a mainframe to a Unix environment in under four months.
The system was originally developed using Software AG`s Adabas database management system and Natural 4GL application development tool, from SPL, part of the Dimension Data Group. "Rapid advances in technology mean software developers need to ensure their applications have the flexibility to accommodate future changes," says Schalk Viljoen, general manager at SPL, sole local representatives of Software AG. "They must use tools that make the resulting software easy to modify or port, as the business environment is always changing."
The combination of Natural and Adabas used by Eskom has continued to prove its flexibility and robustness. These strengths enabled Eskom to port its billing system from the mainframe MVS environment, for which it was developed, to a UNIX platform in minimal time.
"We needed our billing system to run on a Unix platform so that it could be used by the Government of Swaziland," says Ian Dreyer of Eskom`s IS Department.
"The Swazi Government had been using a bureau to handle its electricity billings, which was not an ideal situation. Once the bureau closed its Swaziland office, the entire operation was run remotely from Johannesburg, prompting the Swazi Government to find an alternative.
"They approached Eskom, and were impressed with our billing system. However, in order for it to work for them, it needed to be in Unix, and it needed to cater for large power users as well as the small power users already catered for by the system," says Dreyer.
"Because our original system had been written using Natural/Adabas, the MVS to UNIX porting was incredibly quick and very sound. We needed to make minimal changes to the code, and most of the changes could be done in batch mode. In addition, the Adabas database administration utilities are excellent.
With no knowledge of database administration, some on site and telephonic help from SPL and a manual, we were able to handle this aspect of the conversion quickly and easily. The project was completed within four months."
The system has been running with minimal support in Swaziland. Eskom has also helped install a PC receiving system to transmit data to the Unix system.
"Each of these enhancements has been relatively simple due to the flexibility of the original system," says Dreyer.
SPL is currently assisting the Swaziland Government to ensure Year 2000 compliance for the billing system.
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Dimension Data Hodings
Dimension Data Hodings is South Africa`s largest Information Technology integration company with turnover of R4,7-billion (1997/98). Based in Johannesburg and listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the Group is fast becoming a global organisation with offices in Asia, Australia and the United Kingdom. Its subsidiary, Datacraft Asia, is listed on the main board of the Stock Exchange of Singapore.
Dimension Data Holdings` key business areas focus on the technologies associated with electronic commerce, voice/data convergence and customer management.
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