Company Name: Jordan Kuwait Bank

Industry: Banking

Headquarters: Amman, Jordan

Founded: 1976

Number of Employees: 1000+

URL: www.jordan-kuwait-bank.com

Year of Migration: 2007

Lines of Code: 2M total

Mainframe: Unisys Clearpath NX5600

Migrated to: Sun Solaris

Challenge

Jordan Kuwait Bank is one of the largest banks in Jordan with branches in Cyprus and Palestine. Its core banking package was developed in the proprietary Linc language and ran on a Unisys Clearpath machine. The bank felt that the Linc technology was limiting it in terms of flexibility and the ability to use newer technologies – web browser access etc. It is also very difficult to obtain programmers trained in Linc. They also had a significant body of Cobol code supporting the ATM network.

Solution

JKB decided to use MSS International to port the application and database to open systems technology, and chose Sun to supply the enterprise-scale Unix platform. The database of choice was Oracle and the migration route for the online system was the tried and tested PL/SQL / JSP combination. In addition the bank requested that MSS provide batch code migrated into Java as well as into SqC. The bank’s staff took standard classes on Oracle database and languages supplemented by MSS training on the specifics of the migrated programs and libraries.

Results

The project went live with no significant problems and was well received by the user community who required no special training in the new system. The system is now deployed in Jordan itself as well as Cyprus and Palestine, and they are now able to move forward into a standards based future using much lower cost hardware and software. The cut-overs went extremely smoothly and the new platform performed substantially better than the previous one, with a shortened batch window and a good gain in performance.

Quote

“The contribution of your team at MSS was the major factor leading to the fact that the system is now running with absolutely no performance bottlenecks, and that the bank has saved a decent amount of money and an enormous amount of agony. Your team endured us during our learning process and helped in smoothing our team’s learning curve by providing timely and invaluable support and education to our team.”

Nasser M. Hhraishi, PhD, Assistant General Manager, Information Technology, JKB