A Conversion Case Study on Alliance Coal
CA-IDEAL Datacom Applications "Converted to Oracle"
Alliance Coal, headquartered in Tulsa, is the
eighth largest coal producer in the Eastern United States. With
seven mines in Kentucky, Maryland, Indiana and Illinois,
Alliance Coal supplies coal to power generation companies
throughout the United States. Their 'home-grown' KITS
application (Koal Invoice Tracking System) is Alliance Coal's
core revenue producing application.
About Alliance Coal
Alliance Coal was divested from their parent
company Mapco, Inc., into a privately held stand-alone company.
Within two years Alliance Coal would have to remove all their
applications from the corporate mainframe. "Due to the lengthy
process of the divesture we were suddenly faced with a deadline
to move KITS from the mainframe in less than 18 months"
explained Dan Taylor v Senior Systems Analyst at Alliance Coal.
Searching for a solution
"CA came out to see us and illustrated how we
could move KITS to IDEAL-DATACOM for UNIX," explained Dan "but
we were concerned about the performance of IDEAL-DATACOM on
UNIX."
A more attractive alternative
"As luck would have it I received a 'sales
flyer' from m2o that illustrated how, with its product I2C
(IDEAL to COBOL) we could migrate from CA-IDEAL DATACOM to COBOL
under Oracle. Although we were about to sign a deal with CA, as
they seemed to be the only viable option, we were suddenly
offered a more attractive alternative. Especially as Oracle was
our preferred database," said Dan.
Migrate to a UNIX, Linux, NT or a client server solution
I2C converts CA-IDEAL and CA-DATACOM
applications to COBOL running under UNIX, Linux, VMS, MVS, VSE or
NT/98. I2C allows you to easily and accurately migrate to a
UNIX, Linux, NT or a client server solution while still retaining your
investment in your existing CA-IDEAL applications. The converted
applications run as fully functional character based screens
against any of the major RDBMSs such as Oracle, Sybase or the
DB2 family.
The comfort factor
"I made a call to m2o to discuss I2C in more
detail. We were very impressed with Huw Price of m2o immediately
illustrated his thorough knowledge of the CA-IDEAL DATACOM
environment. This gave us a great comfort factor v the success
of the migration was absolutely critical. m2o were able to allay
any fears we initially had," explained Dan.
Converting the code to COBOL
"One of my biggest concerns" Dan illustrated,
"was converting the code to COBOL. Although we were more than
happy moving to Oracle, we were unsure how COBOL would perform.
Now though, the KITS application is one of best performing
applications we have v it represents the easiest application to
maintain. We are more than impressed."
Geography not an issue
"As we were based in the South West of the US we
were initially concerned about dealing with a company based in
England. The success of the project was critical to us and it
was not as if we could jump in the car and visit m2o if there
were pressing issues to deal with."
"m2o were of course aware of this and always proved more than
flexible. The team that managed the conversion worked
exceptionally hard. Stephen Cirel, the Senior Conversion
Consultant at m2o, was excellent. His knowledge of the
conversion process, including the table definitions and indexes,
was instrumental in the success of our conversion. We have been
up and running on Oracle for the last 18 months and the system
has been running very well."
Over 800 CA-IDEAL programs
The migration consisted of over 800 CA-IDEAL
programs, and associated panels and reports. In addition the
data had to be migrated from over 200 CA-Datacom tables to
associated Oracle tables. The system was migrated to AIX UNIX
and the users accessed the application via terminal emulators.
Technical challenges
Huw Price, m2o's technical manager explained
that "This migration was quite interesting, Mapco (Alliance
Coal) were moving their operating system, their language and
their database. There were some technical challenges on the way;
however, the conversion team quickly overcame all of these. From
a practical point of view, the testing of the new system and the
establishment of the new infrastructure are the hardest parts."
'Look and Feel' of the result
"There was very little user retraining required
as the look and feel of the applications remained the same. The
users were very cooperative and ran several days in parallel to
ensure the correct running of the new system."
Expert Data Management
m2o specialises in transforming legacy systems,
and in particular automated conversions from CA-IDEAL to open
languages such as COBOL and Java, and automated migrations from
CA-DATACOM to open databases such as Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server.
Many years of experience in this field mean m2o has a wealth of
technical expertise and experience at its disposal, complemented
by a comprehensive toolkit. m2o brings a level of automation,
platform cover and accuracy to the conversion process that is
unmatched by any other product or service available today.
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