A Conversion Case Study on HBA Health Insurance

m2o Heals HBA Health Insurance with Business Application Migration

UNIX migration reduces costs, maintains reliability and minimises impact on business

HBA Health Insurance has made annual savings of $2 million by migrating its business applications from an expensive mainframe system to a lower-cost UNIX platform using tools from leading legacy migration software provider, m2o. By migrating its legacy assets, HBA is now ready to take advantage of a modernised Web services infrastructure to improve customer service levels and further reduce IT costs.
 

BUPA acquisition prompted major systems migration

With more than a million members, HBA is one of Australia's major health insurers and part of worldwide health and care company, BUPA. When BUPA acquired HBA in 2003, it separated all key systems from its previous owner (AXA) to establish its own computer functions and IT services in Melbourne. The final transfer was the migration of BOSS - the core administration and service system of the business - from a mainframe located in New York to a UNIX Sun Solaris system in Australia.

Time was a crucial consideration

"Many options were considered, including creating a like-for-like system in Australia, or using the BUPA parent system as a base for the new system," said Peter Powell, CIO, HBA Australia. "However, none of these options really matched our requirements or fitted into the time available."

m2o Heals HBA Health Insurance with Business Application Migration

After considering a number of different options, HBA chose the m2o'S i2c to automate the conversion of CA-IDEAL to Micro Focus Cobol and the migration of CA-DATACOM to Oracle. The migration had minimal impact to existing business processes and IS development staff.

Migration resulted in savings

"The savings we're making by migrating our applications to UNIX are being re-invested to improve services to our members," said Powell. "It also gives us a modern platform and the means to establish further Web services down the track."

ROI achieved in under three years

The software and hardware migration was completed in 14 months and went live in January 2005. Powell estimates an ROI (Return on Investment) of just under three years for the migration which saw the conversion of six million lines of code and tens of thousands of files .BUPA has also found the new UNIX-based system just as reliable as the old mainframe platform.

Partnership fundamental to success

"Our automated toolset was only part of the solution," said Huw Price, Managing Director, m2o. "We automated 99%+ of the code conversion and data migration, but the knowledge and helpfulness of HBA staff was also fundamental to the success of the project."

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.