ING Bank migrates IBM COBOL to Java for Cloud deployment
ING Bank, one of Europe's top 10 largest, has used SoftwareMining Translator to migrate 1.2 Million lines of
online and batch COBOL code(CICS/DB2 and JCL) to Java.
The bank's initial plan was to outsource the migration and rewrite of their legacy COBOL applications to Java.
However, after months of technical evaluation, cost and risk analysis, the bank opted to perform the
project in-house using SoftwareMining's COBOL to Java Translator Tool.
The project took 18 months to complete - mostly due to a comprehensive testing phase involving comparison of over 2 billion transactions.
The overall annual saving for moving away from mainframe was said to be in tens of million Euros per year. This included the savings for
- Moving from Mainframe to private cloud
- Using more plentiful and less expensive Java resources
Additional benefits of moving to Java included
- agile development- faster implementation of changes to system
- stability: The new testing suite, used for testing new system, can be used for impact analysis of new changes
- better development life cycle using new tools and libraries: from open-source logging to Maven for deployment
Influencing factors for selecting SoftwareMining
The primary factors for selection of SoftwareMining tools were:
Project Considerations
The testing part of the project, by far the biggest activity, required the involvement of bank's own resources who already had detailed knowledge of the system's functionality.
This justified the remaining smaller parts of the project also to be brought inhouse using a mix of banks internal resources, current System-Integrator and extra contractors when needed.
The approach offered the following advantages:
- Security: no code or data needed to ever leave the bank's premises
- Better control over costs, risks and timescales
- Simplification of the re-translation and re-testing phases in the face of changing COBOL code requirements
Technical Considerations
- Accurate generation of the Java code in line with a viable testing phase
- A generated Java code that can be maintained by developers
- The ability to cooperate with the mainframe, which was facilitated by SoftwareMining's libraries through the dynamic conversion of data files that contained packed-decimal fields
- Continued use of existing (DB2) databases
- An MQSeries migration strategy that enables communication with MQSeries, with a means of migration to other Message-Queuing
- Utilisation of IBM CICS functionality through a SoftwareMining equivalent
- Seamless integration from JCL Migration to Unix Shell scripts, and with the translated Java code
Commercial Considerations
- Improved maintainability of the bank's legacy system
- Reduced running costs
- Enhanced risk management protocols
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