Services
The challenges of maintaining the IBM Mainframe systems which are based on legacy technology from Independent Software Vendors are increasing significantly as time goes on, forcing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the mainframe to rise without any additional benefit.
Upgrade charges from some vendors are becoming exponentially higher, and these upgrades add no value to the use of the technologies. Indeed some vendors are now demanding upgrade fees to allow their customers to use outsourced personnel in addition to their in-house staff.
In many cases, key staff who are subject matter experts in both the applications and the underlying technologies are reaching retirement age, with suitable replacements virtually impossible to find. Offshore companies cannot provide staff experienced in these outmoded languages and databases.
TSG supplies a range of services to migrate clients away from these legacy products to more modern maintainable technologies, in most cases to COBOL CICS and DB2.
Relevant technical and development skills are readily available, both locally and offshore, and the cost of ownership (license fees and upgrades) are negligible compared to the cost of the older proprietary technologies.
In addition to the migration service itself, a summary of which is below, TSG can offer many additional technical services to assist clients in their migration.
These are largely customized to the clients requirements and include but are not limited to:
Understanding the application infrastructure. Clients often have lost the knowledge of their own architecture, and are unaware of how the systems interoperate; in this case our specialists can assist by analyzing the environment and producing a map of the interactions between the systems and databases.
Testing a migrated application or database. Many clients recognize that the cost and complexity of testing a converted systems is often greater than the cost of conversion itself. In our case, because we carry out the migration using automated products, the cost of testing is reduced, as the conversion itself is far more reliable, and the results more consistent.
For some situations, such as database migration, we can produce test scripts to exercise the applications and the new database, thereby reducing the overall testing timescale and costs.
These are just two simple examples, please contact us to discuss your individual requirements or challenges!
Following is a summary of the technology migration services.
MANTIS
TSG offers a proven conversion capability of Mantis into standard Cobol CICS. There are no run time licenses, the code is structured fully pseudo-conversational. more...
CSP
Converting CSP into COBOL CICS is a little simpler than other languages, and will produce straightforward pseudo-conversational COBOL CICS programs,. Certain forms of VisualAge Gen can also be converted. more...
CA-Telon
The CA-Telon migration service has 2 options. CA-Telon applications can be migrated into Casegen, which is a replacement application development tool running on a PC, or they can be converted into modern well structured programs in COBOL or PL1. Note: CA-Telon programs often have licensed modules that are required at run rime, we can replace these if the systems are no longer actively maintained. more...
MTEXT
The MText migration service allows documents to be extracted from MText and migrated into more modern print management technologies such as ISIS Papyrus. more...
PL/I to Cobol
On-line and batch PL/I programs can be converted to functionally equivalent Cobol. more...
Supra
Supra, RDM, PDM, Total and Supra SQL can be migrated to DB2. The application code is unchanged and the database is fully usable by new SQL programs. more...
TopSecret/ACF2 to RACF
TSG provides a proven and tested methodology for converting CA-Top Secret or CA-ACF/2 to RACF. more...
Cobol to Java
Using a proven methodology, TSG can provide a simple, highly automated route to migrate your existing Cobol applications into Java (J2EE) or C#/ASP. more...
IDMS
IDMS, along with it’s 4GL ADS/Online, and all the associated application code in Cobol can be converted to a COBOL, COBOL/CICS and DB2 environment, thereby simplifying maintenance and reducing CA licence fees. more...
ADABAS NATURAL
The Adabas database, and all applications using it, be they in Natural or COBOL can now be migrated to COBOL, COBOL / CICS and DB2, avoiding the cost of the Software AG licence and any future upgrade charges. more...