Cybermation announced on Tuesday they joined Microsoft’s hip Mainframe Migration Alliance. The wizards of Redmond created this exclusive group as an initiative aimed at helping enterprises move to their .NET platform.
Cybermation helps enterprises with conversion tools and resources necessary to migrate mainframe legacy schedules into a lower cost platform. Cybermation aims to help enterprises reduce risk, time costs and complexity of migration and improve ROI.
The MMA comprises a number of information technology companies who collaborate to assist customers with their migration from proprietary host-based mainframe systems to Intel architecture and Windows Server System platforms such as .NET and Wintel. The partnership program also provides a central location for information and tools to help enterprise IT organizations understand migration-related issues and to learn from others’ success.
“By migrating to a Windows-based platform we were able to reduce our expenditure and increase our investment in other areas. We expect to see cost savings of up to $1 million a year simply from migrating to the new open system,” said Peter Howling, vice president of IT, Lombard Canada Ltd. “We chose to work with partners from the MMA because this is seen as a trusted resource for locating vendors, service suppliers and the tools necessary to migrate applications.”‘
Cybermation recently announced its first MMA project for insurance company Lombard Canada Ltd, undertaken with MMA partners CRATOS, a migration specialist, and Micro Focus, a provider of legacy application development and deployment software for enterprise platforms. The three worked with Lombard Canada to move its core applications from the mainframe to the Windows Server 2003 operating system and SQL Server. As part of this project, Lombard replaced its legacy job scheduler with Cybermation’s ESP distributed job scheduler to automate batch job scheduling workload and manage system resources.
“By moving to a Windows-based platform, enterprises find they have a wider choice of vendors. Plus, firms can avoid costly licensing, upgrades and support costs. Many vendor mainframe applications have cost factors of 5 or 10:1 compared to those running on a Windows server,” said Spyros Sakellariadis, Director of the Mainframe Migration Alliance at Microsoft Corporation.
The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is an alliance of companies offering technology and services to support customers who wish to migrate applications from the mainframe to the Microsoft Windows platform. The MMA provides a central location for information and tools to help enterprise IT organizations understand migration-related issues and to learn from others success.
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
