Cape Town-based IT company MigrationWare has won a multimillion-rand contract to modernise Danish company Bankdata's IT assets.
Bankdata provides IT solutions, services and security for banks and customers in Denmark. Its services were originally developed using Mantis, a fourth-generation development language (4GL). MigrationWare will transfer the applications to a Cobol environment.
MigrationWare has completed the first phase of the project, which is designed to map-out and check all processes in order to lay the foundation for the execution of all remaining phases.
"Any international contract won by a South African company is significant. Such deals serve to promote SA as a country possessing the people and the capacity to engage with First World organisations requiring technically complex solutions," says Jo~ao de Oliveira, MigrationWare sales director.
He says it shows local companies can compete successfully with other international organisations for business. According to De Oliveira, four other international companies were evaluated for the deal.
"For MigrationWare, the Nordic market, in particular, has been a particularly good one and MigrationWare is successfully building a reputation as a company of worth within that region through a number of successful projects with the likes of Bankdata, Scandinavian Airlines and other organisations."
The technology
Mantis, like many of the interactive 4GLs, was developed and widely implemented for the development of IT systems in the 1980s and 1990s.
"However, like many of 4GLs, software costs, ongoing maintenance costs and a dwindling number of qualified technicians worldwide have resulted in companies like Bankdata migrating applications developed in Mantis to other environments," says De Oliveira.
He says Bankdata chose a Cobol environment because of its stability and wide application on mainframe platforms. "The reason for this is that the mainframe offers many qualities that they consider essential to their business and to the servicing of their clients, including the efficient processing of substantial numbers of batch transactions," he says.
Cobol is still widely used by many financial institutions globally and has been in the industry for more than 50 years.
"It has evolved significantly over the years. The language still has significant application today and is widely used because it meets financial business needs by providing mission-critical, high throughput systems for processing bulk financial transactions," he says.
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