Company Name: Teachers Assurance

Industry: Finance

Headquarters: Bournemouth, UK

Founded: 1877

Number of Employees: 200

URL: www.teachersassurance.co.uk

Year of Migration: 1998

Lines of Code: 2M

Mainframe: Unisys A12F

Migrated to: Tulip on Microsoft servers

Challenge

Teachers Assurance specializes in providing financial products to education professionals in the UK. The organization had invested £8m in developing a sophisticated life & pensions application in Linc. This ran on a Unisys A12 platform which was due to become obsolete in 1999. They requested MSS to study their Unisys mainframe environment and propose a plan for its conversion to run on a Windows platform using Oracle database software and tools. The initial goal was to complete the migration over a 6 month time period, as the Unisys licenses were due to expire in that period.

Solution

The hardware supplier of choice for Teachers was Tulip. Microsoft Windows used as the operating system for servers. The LAN architecture using TCP/IP as the standard protocol needed no change. The software running on the new server system included Windows server & Microsoft C++ development system. The database and Oracle development system software used was Oracle RDBMS, Oracle Developer/2000 including Oracle Forms. SQLPlus and PL/SQL Oracle Programmer/2000 including Pro*C.

Results

When it became apparent to Unisys that the migration was inevitable, they changed their attitude and negotiated a reasonable monthly charge for continued use of the mainframe beyond the 6-month period. This allowed Teachers to complete their other projects as well as the migration without working under undue pressure. When the converted system was implemented on Tulip PC Servers, Teachers realised immediate savings in cost of hardware, software and maintenance over continuing with a mainframe strategy. But the main benefit was in interoperability and integration of the system with others based on similar technology.

Quote

“Besides achieving the demands of Y2K compliance we have a system operating more efficiently in an environment which we can support with maintenance cost reduced by a factor of 10 & system uptime in excess of 99%”

Barry Long, Director of Systems and Strategy, Teachers Assurance

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