Make Your Business On Demand
Migrating from Sun iPlanet to IBM WebSphere
Application
Description
Advantages
- Support an On Demand model
- Reduce costs
- Single vendor solution
CLIENT BACKGROUND
This provider of insurance and investment products for individuals, businesses and institutions is part of a financial insurance corporation that is the largest life insurer in Canada, second largest in North America, and fifth largest in the world.
BUSINESS PROBLEM
Given the company’s mission to divest itself of its expenses, the company decided to move to an On Demand model for its IT needs and services. This entailed moving to a single-vendor solution comprised of best-of-breed technology. A critical success factor in this effort was to migrate the 26 mission-critical applications that were used to run its business. The applications, which were all running on Sun iPlanet, supported offices around the country and included functions such as providing accounting and investing analytics to the underwriters, enabling online audit and tracking, and quoting life insurance options. Additionally, Sun Microsystems announced that it was ending the life and dropping all support for iPlanet. So, the migration of all 26 applications needed to be completed within one and a half calendar months.
SOLUTION
Initially, the company was concerned about cost and risk of migrating 26 mission-critical iPlanet applications. To ease these concerns, Prolifics, specialists in Technology Migrations, first conducted an assessment to prove the migration strategy. In the end, Prolifics was able to not only successfully migrate all 26 applications within the timeframe; they came in slightly ahead of schedule and under budget. By moving from a legacy environment to a J2EE architecture, this company gained a reliable foundation from which to grow.
The migration team made heavy use of Rational lifecycle tooling, in particular Rational Application Developer (RAD). Since all the code could be imported into the tooling, RAD could identify compatibility issues which significantly improved productivity during the migration process. In one example an application showed 2000 errors upon an initial import. Our migration experts combined their expertise with the information the tool provided to identify repeating patterns and therefore reduce the true number of errors to address from 2000 to 5.
The On Demand model included outsourcing and transforming the company’s entire IT infrastructure—staff, hardware and software. The new model allows them to focus on their core business, finance and life insurance. It significantly reduces cost and allows the company to be flexible to business fluctuations by creating a single vendor solution and employing a “pay as you use” model. By adopting a corporate standard around IBM WebSphere, the company gains a reliable platform for supporting their On Demand Business.