Chicago, IL – November 8, 2010 – Clerity, a full-service provider of mainframe migration, modernization, and optimization solutions, and Logica, a leading business and technology service company and strategic Clerity partner, today announced that the IT Department of the Ministry of Justice in Portugal, Instituto das Technologias de Informação na Justiça (ITIJ), has reduced annual operating costs by 95% through a mainframe migration and modernization project. By migrating its IBM® Information Management System (IMS™) environment to open systems and decommissioning the mainframe, ITIJ dramatically lowered costs and established a flexible foundation to effectively respond to future business requirements.
ITIJ has been gradually consolidating operations onto new open systems servers. However, two important IBM IMS technology-based applications remained on the mainframe. They were responsible for citizen identification and vehicle registration records, required 24x7 access, and contained valuable historic data and business rules that could not be compromised by migration.
Supporting these applications on the mainframe cost ITIJ approximately 1.45 million Euro per year, a disproportionate amount of the agency's budget. Seeking a more cost-effective solution, ITIJ issued a market request for information (RFI). Responding to the RFI, Logica and Clerity demonstrated that UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software from Clerity would allow ITIJ to replatform its legacy IBM IMS application and data investments onto flexible open systems and avoid renewing a costly mainframe lease.
"A successful proof of concept gave us the opportunity to ensure that Logica and the Clerity technology could meet our complex requirements in the timeframe required and demonstrated that our IT department could successfully collaborate with Logica and Clerity on this mission-critical endeavor," said Dr. Bruno Sá, president of ITIJ.
Mainframe compatible transaction processing capabilities within UniKix enable IBM IMS transactions, communications, screens, and the IBM IMS hierarchical data model to be deployed on open systems. The technology enables IBM IMS Transaction Manager applications and IBM IMS Database environments to be moved to distributed platforms without the expense of re-engineering or risk of redevelopment with commercial off-the-shelf software.
After the POC, Logica's Competency Centre for IT Modernization performed a complete assessment of ITIJ's mainframe environment, established the new target environment, and began the four-month migration project with Clerity's assistance. The project was completed on time, so ITIJ did not have to renew its costly mainframe contract.
As part of the implementation, mainframe COBOL and Assembler programs were converted to the isCOBOL Application Suite from Veryant. Logica and Clerity mapped third-party software and operational aspects of the workload such as security and system management requirements to ITIJ's standards on Linux to ensure an end-to-end solution.
Since production cutover, ITIJ's development team has continued maintaining data using familiar IBM IMS constructs and simultaneously taken advantage of new Oracle database capabilities and direct SQL access to improve search functionality and refresh batch processes.
"With the UniKix software solution from Clerity, we cut annual operating costs by 95%, providing new functionality to better serve our constituents," continued Dr. Bruno Sá. "Now we have a consolidated, flexible foundation to quickly respond to market change and future integration requirements."
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