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"We needed to match the legacy system's
ability to support over 2,000 concurrent users,"
Fitgerald explains. "The UNIX operating system
was chosen because of its proven multitasking
operability. We selected Oracle because it could
support a national application of this size, and
because of its compatibility with so many other
database development tools, CASE tools, and Web
services"
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Out-Maneuvering Obsolescence
The threat of outmoded and unsupported technology
is especially troublesome for organizations that
continue to depend on Wang hardware to run business-critical
applications. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) National
Center for Employee Development(NCED) found itself
facing just this predicament. Responsible for
training USPS maintenance employees on the equipment
used to sort and distribute mail nationwide, the
NCED needed to get its core applications off of
the Wang hardware as soon as possible, with little
or no interference with current operations. The
NCED's options were to re-engineer its online
Automated Enrollment System (AES), or to convert
to a new hardware and software system.
The choice between re-engineering and converting
was not too difficult. Once the NCED calculated
the cost and time associated with re-engineering
its business rules, specification documentation,
and development, testing, and training processes,
and determined it lacked the necessary staff resource
allocation, its only real option was conversion.
However, there was another hurdle to overcome:
the NCED intended to migrate to an Oracle platform,
but all of its applications were written in Wang
COBOL. The NCED, therefore, had to find conversion
tools and direction that could help accomplish
the USPS's objectives. "Our biggest challenge
was migrating a legacy, mainframe-based system
onto an open-systems platform," explains Delinda
Fitgerald, Information Systems Coordinator at
the USPS NCED in Norman, Oklahoma.
To meet its performance objectives, the NCED
needed to keep up with increasing system activity;
migrate off the Wang immediately; and improve
response times, programming efficiency and reliability
- without interrupting operations. So the NCED
turned to American Cybernetic Corporation, an
Oracle Business alliance Partner that specializes
in the conversion of WANG COBOL and PACE applications.
A Growing and Critical Application
The NCED developed the Automated Enrollment System
(AES), a training administration application,
in 1986. Since the application's inception, its
end-user population has grown from 85 to 2,500
in over 500 postal facilities nationwide. The
NCED has an average of 700 students enrolled at
the Norman facility each week, attending classes
that range from one day to six weeks long. However,
the AES now supports an average of 2,500 weekly
enrollments, That includes the NCED's resident,
field, and distance-learning courses; plus national
management training. The application written in
Wang COBOL and comprises approximately 700,000
lines of source code, and 56 data files - several
with more than 100,000 records. The system had
at least 200 concurrent users, with a peak of
about 1,250 - and its range was growing.
"We needed to match the legacy system's ability
to support over 2,000 concurrent users," Fitgerald
explains. "The UNIX operating system was chosen
because of its proven multitasking operability.
We selected Oracle because it could support a
national application of this size, and because
of its compatibility with so many other database
development tools, CASE tools, and Web services."
The NCED selected American Cybernetic Corporation
(ACC) because the company offers a comprehensive
set of tools and services to convert or re-engineer
existing Wang-VS COBOL to MicroFocus COBOL with
Oracle access and WANG PACE applications to Oracle
Forms on any open platform, including the conversion
of the production to Oracle tables. What
was most impressive to the NCED was that ACC's
conversion methodology used only native code without
embedding WANG like code in the converted system,
as is done with emulated conversions; the NCED
knew that such emulation techniques would cause
considerable maintenance and response problems.
In addition to the strong ACC references, ACC
has a superior Website design and development
team who had considerable interactive database
experience and specialized tools (also used for
subsequent development at the NCED.)
The target system was a Sun SPARC/20 dual 75MHz
running Solaris 8.x. It was the NCED's intent
to convert the application to the target system
with all of the functionality of the Wang system,
thus making the conversion as transparent as possible
to the users. In order to accomplish this, the
American Cybernetic team converted the COBOL programs
to the target system, converted the data files
to Oracle tables, and maintained the same basic
functionality. Also, the NCED's staff had to install
all software and hardware components. The return-on-investment
calculation dictated that all of this be accomplished
within four months! "With the excellent support
of American Cybernetic, we achieved our goal,"
says Fitgerald.
A Giant Step Forward
Thus far, American Cybernetic's tools (Transporter)
and conversion services have enabled the NCED
to utilize Oracle to support application tables,
with original Wang front-end still in place. "This
portion of the application is supported with Micro-Focus
COBOL with SQL calls to the Oracle tables," Fitzgerald
says. The next phase of the conversion project
includes migrating the query and reporting functions
of the application onto Oracle Web Server for
eventual deployment across the U.S. Postal Service's
intranet. "This will represent approximately 80
percent of the application's functionality, and
will deliver the greatest impact on productivity,"
Fitgerald says. "Because the Web services are
developed using CASE tools, we expect an exponential
increase in both user and developer productivity."
(Subsequently, ACC web-enabled the application.)
All at the Click of a Button
The change in software and applications contributing
to this improvement, however, should be transparent
to AES's end users. "Our end users can access
AES only via the Postal Service's Wide Area Network,"
Fitgerald says. "If all works as planned, I don't
expect they'll need to be made aware that they're
now using an Oracle product."
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