IHK - Industrie und Handelskammer
"Modernising our BS2000 has been risk free, smooth, and achieved it's goals. We significantly lowered our license and maintenance costs and are now future proof."
Shaking off excess legacy baggage
Facing the two-pronged challenge of needing to trim its IT operating expenses, whilst expanding its IT services to deal with growing business complexity, the IHK management team faced the task of having to modernise the BS2000 Mainframe, whilst retaining the full functionality of its custom built ERP application along with the stability, reliability and availability of the BS2000.
IT executives converted these needs into a detailed requirement specification, in terms of hardware, operating and database management system, taking in to consideration future expansion forecasts. Microsoft windows 2008, operating on a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 were selected. The next question was œhow to rehost and with whom?
Initial post project forecasts show an incredible 8 month payback period is anticipated, with executives expecting to save more 60% monthly in licensing, maintenance, and energy while they are also looking forward to stronger productivity of their development teams and establishing stronger ties with client organisations.
Our Client - Industrie und Handelskammer (IHK) Cologne
The IHK (Chamber of Commerce & Industry) is a public organisation whose mission is to integrate local and international businesses and organisations. Their mission is to support the generation of trade to and from the greater Cologne region. Local businesses are automatically members and can access a major archive and network of resources locally, nationally and internationally to help them to develop their business.
State education and training exam boards are hosted by the IHK and constant measures are used to align regional skill sets with market requirements.
5000 Concurrent users
IHK's IT director, Mr. Thomas Kirchrath explained the IHK data centre is accessed by approximately 700 concurrent internal users using their custom built ERP system to conduct a myriad of transactions, accessing, exchanging and archiving information in real time, as well as supporting a very comprehensive web presence.
Moreover, six other chambers of commerce organisations have outsourced their IT to IHK so it is estimated that approximately 5000 users perform transactions concurrently.
Mr. Kirchrath added, The degree of stability in the BS2000 is the benchmark, and this must be guaranteed.
Outgoing sitation
The onset of the global ecconomic crisis has bought with it unprecedented cost cutting activities, whilst greater exploitation of asset potential is becoming a key differentiator. Unlike the crisis, this mindset is here stay.
The main driver for the IHK modernisation project has been the prohibitve monthly operating costs. As usual in the case of BS2000, these costs are based upon the ability or power of the system to compute a massive amounts of transactions in realtime. In laymans terms, the costs are relative to the the system ™s hoursepower. Conversley, modern operating systems and applications are more lean and efficient, and don't require the same amount of computational power. With the rehosting software suite and techniques mastered by HTWC®, a logical and feasible approach was to move these applications onto the Windows 2008 operating system, which indeed uses 75% of the computational power, thus lowering costs corrospondingly. Additionally, through the use of the application compilor, IBBIS is now in a more effiecient develpment environement, enabling application expansion and intgration of œoff the shelf applications.
The scope of the project Scope entailed the rehosting of the following list of application assets, with minimum modification; 481 Cobol programmes, 335 copybooks, 71 LEASY files, 285 Enter jobs and 575 Procedures.
Stepping into the future
The custom built IBBIS ERP system was developed by the IHK based upon the BS2000 architecture. The one to one, seamless rehosting of this application to a leaner and more open environment was the key objective of this project. The project goal was the emulation IBBIS, from a FSC BS2000/OSD environment to Windows Server 2008, on Unisys ES7000 Hardware.
To download the pdf document, please click here
