Paymaster has greatly cut processing time and put itself in a position to further automate more easily and scale more cost effectively as a result of migrating a banking application from a mainframe to a Windows platform.

Paymaster is a provider of banking, pensions administration and payroll services in the UK. The banking application it migrated handles 60,000 to 100,000 orders per day of checks that are being sent between British government departments. The service was originally part of the British government, but was sold privately in the late 1990s, first to EDS and later to Xafinity, the parent company of Paymaster.

The application was one that Paymaster had tried to migrate from the mainframe onto an HP platform running UNIX in advance of Y2K, but that migration was unsuccessful. Having received word that support would be discontinued for its ICL Trimetra mainframe, Paymaster considered putting the applications on a new mainframe or hosting them on someone else’s mainframe before cost advantages led them to the decision to migrate to a Windows environment, said Ralph Tigwell, director of business technology at Paymaster.

As a result of the migration, batch processing times have been slashed by an order of magnitude.

“There were two components to the processing. The online activities that run during the day look identical to the old environment, so it’s easy to use,” said Tigwell. “The batch suite is dependent on some of our other systems to give it data, but we estimate that it can run the processing in 15 minutes compared to the three to four hours it used to take.”

Employees who previously worked late into the night to make sure the processing job completed can leave before 8 p.m., allowing consolidation to a single shift operation. The migration has a 10 month ROI with substantial bottom line savings coming from licensing, hardware, simple hosting for DR and operational staffing.

Working with Transoft, a firm specializing in migrations, the project began with a four-week “pathfinder” project in which the scope of the migration was detailed. The project began in October, with delivery of the migrated application in late January. After two months of testing, remediation and parallel runs, Paymaster went live with the new system and stopped its use of the mainframe by mid-April, in advance of the end of April deadline.

The system now runs on the Windows 2003 environment on an HP DL360 2, using Micro Focus COBOL. Windows Virtual Server is used for disaster recovery.

Transoft executed the migration in cooperation with EDS, to whom Paymaster has outsourced its IT department. The migration involved 190,000 lines of COBOL and 40,000 lines of SCL. Two other applications on the ICL had previously been moved to an Oracle financial application, but the banking suite had been saved for last due to its complexity.

“It was a classic application migration in that the application was very customized, and unique. This type of application can’t be replaced without inordinate expense, and therefore it’s very risky,” said Geoff Baker, managing director of Transoft. “Fifty percent of the migrations we do are a result of previous failed rewrites or failed package replacements because people never understand fully the scope of what existing legacy applications do.”

Paymaster is automating the application and will use Microsoft Operations Manager to help it become more proactive about monitoring the health of the system. Tigwell and Baker noted that when the system was first written, physical tapes were involved. Now tasks that previously required someone to respond to screen prompts can be automated.

Should Paymaster decide to have the servers hosted externally, an idea that it is currently considering, it would use Windows Terminal Services to enable employees to access the servers remotely. In fact, remote hosting has become a more viable possibility because of the migration to the new environment, said Tigwell.

“This is true for disaster recovery as well,” said Tigwell. “We used to have only one provider that we could use for disaster recovery for our ICL. Now we have virtualized the environment under Microsoft Virtual Server.”

Moving forward, the migration has left the firm well positioned to take on new business that can be serviced by the banking suite. The flexibility of the Windows system makes it easier to adapt the application to new business.

“Although our previous system could scale substantially for an individual business it was unwieldy, whereas with this system we can easily make clones of it to suit multiple businesses. The greater flexibility is also due to our ability to move files more easily than on the mainframe. It’s easier to do because it’s largely around the handling of files using standard Windows tools,” Tigwell said.