Johannesburg, 05 Oct 2012
MigrationWare, a systems migration and modernisation company, has announced its recent strategic partnership with ATERAS - itself a company specialising in automated solutions for legacy migration and modernisation - aimed at bringing a broader set of modernisation offerings to the market.
Of particular relevance to the large community of Natural and Adabas** users in South Africa, is the ATERAS Application Transparency Platform (ATP), a highly-capable, cost-effective solution for rehosting Natural and Adabas systems on a Windows Server-based platform.
"By combining our offerings and the strength of our joint modernisation experience, we believe that we will be better able to service our global customer base, with a broader and more competitive set of solutions" said Mark Cooper, MigrationWare CEO.
Traditionally, for those wishing to modernise or migrate their legacy applications, the principle approach has been to convert code and data away from existing technologies to alternative strategic platforms and technologies. For systems written in Natural, this could mean either rewriting or pursuing an automated migration to either COBOL, C# or Java.
While the automated conversion approach remains valid and worthy of consideration, ATP introduces an entirely different approach capable of revolutionising the standard approach to Natural and Adabas systems migration.
The ATP solution provides an independent means of re-hosting Natural with an end-to-end solution, which significantly lowers high licence costs, supports higher productivity and maintains full preservation of legacy assets and business rules. The ATP solution also transforms Adabas databases and data to an alternative relational database - DB2, SQL Server or Oracle.
David Blencowe, Technical Director at MigrationWare, said: "ATP allows for a seamless move of Natural applications from Software AG supported environments, to alternative more economical environments, by fully supporting the Natural language independently of Software AG product. ATP flawlessly interprets and executes each Natural command, meaning that the Natural applications can execute against the new relational database without changes to the Natural syntax of one's current applications."
The ATP solution greatly shortens the modernisation window so that legacy modernisation is no longer a long-term project. With ATP, a project that would otherwise have taken years to execute will now take months. Yet, ATP is also just the first step in a modernisation strategy for those keen to continue that journey towards a fully renewed and revitalised application. ATP's sister product, ATERAS' Rapid Program Modernisation (eav/RPM), is designed to enable modernisation to be performed to deliver new applications, allowing analysts to be involved in the decision of what business rules to retain and what visual and navigational enhancements to make. Code is then automatically converted from Natural to COBOL or object-oriented C# and Java.
A good example of the impact that ATP can have on a business is evident from the recent project delivered by ATERAS to the US Department of Energy Savannah River Operations Office (DOE-SR*).
"The DOE-SR needed a fast solution to rehost in a Windows environment that met their technical requirements. ATP provided the only alternative in the industry for a fast, efficient solution for moving Natural and Adabas off the mainframe to Windows without impact to the business. The ROI was accelerated to months instead of years," said Scott Miller, CEO, President, ATERAS.
The DOE-SR had two applications that were written in Natural with Adabas and hosted on an IBM zSeries model mainframe. Both applications were successfully migrated to Windows Server 2008 R2 standard and SQL Server 2008 standard. The requirement was to remove Natural and Adabas as quickly as possible without changes to the application code. The Natural applications were moved without change from their current mainframe environment to a less expensive, more robust ATP environment on Windows. The Adabas databases and data were automatically transformed to SQL Server. The ATP development environment was enhanced with full documentation, impact analysis, dynamic debugging and version control. The transition was seamless with no impact to the business and no need for end-user or developer re-training."
Scott Miller, CEO, President, ATERAS, said: "Our partnership with MigrationWare is a very strategic alliance providing our clients with the best possible combination of products, services, experience and professionalism. We believe that having MigrationWare represent our award winning ATP products is an excellent strategy for demonstrating the value these solutions provide for the Natural and Adabas community."
* Use of the Department of Energy and the Savannah River Operations Office names does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of the ATERAS product.
** Natural and ADABAS are registered trademarks of Software AG.
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