Company Name: Clal Insurance

Industry: Insurance

Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel

Founded: 1987

Number of Employees: 4,000

URL: www.clalbit.co.il

Year of Migration: 2003

Lines of Code: 3M

Cobol Mainframe: Unisys Clearpath NX4800

Migrated to: HP Alpha

Challenge

Clal Insurance is one of the largest general insurance companies operating in the competitive Israeli market. It has a very sophisticated insurance application that has evolved over many years. However the fact that the application was tied to a legacy Unisys mainframe frustrated Clal’s long-term aim of moving towards open, commodity based systems. When it became clear that, in April 2004, the machine would either have to be scrapped or re-licensed for a long term, it was decided that a complete migration was the only logical option. Due to strict time constraints this migration had to be completed within an 8-month timeframe.

Solution

Using the MSS Migrate!Cobol automated conversion software the hardware and automated migration approach allowed the migration to happen with the minimum of impact on day-to-day operations. We did not attempt to replace all of the COMS features, just those needed. The MCS!Lite product was used to implement the essential functions – transaction based routing including program to program messaging, support for screen formatting – with minimal overhead.

Results

The migration was completed in 8 months and went live before the re-licensing deadline. The cut-over went extremely smoothly and the new platform performed substantially better than the previous one. Moving the code to a Unix environment allowed Clal to implement code configuration management tools for better management of the development and QA environments. The migration not only saved many millions of dollars in cost but also allowed Clal staff to work in a more productive and future-proof environment.

Quote

“The MSS professionals were the leaders of this extraordinary project. Their superb professionalism and dedication alongside the uncompromising decisiveness to make it work created the basis for the infrastructure for our current system”.

Hanoch Ben-David, CTO of Clal Insurance Pension and Financial Group.

<< BACK