Making the Smart Move from Mainframe to Microsoft

Asysco Migration Technology helps companies save money
and unlock the full potential of their legacy applications

We sat down with Jayson B. Goldman, managing director of Asysco, a global leader in legacy migration solutions, who shared why legacy modernization is an inevitable decision that is better made sooner rather than later, for organizations still depending on a mainframe.

WFS:  Tell us about Asysco and the key advantages of your solution.

JG: Asysco is a global company with more than 30 years experience in the Unisys migration market.  We have over 100 customers in more than 20 countries including leaders in financial services, insurance, retail, manufacturing, wholesale, education and government.

Asysco’s migration technology (AMT) LION and AMT-VS (Visual Studio) help modernize organizations’ information systems by quickly transferring business-critical applications to either a proprietary environment or an open source, .NET platform through a fully automated process.  This helps companies, speed up development and time-to-market of new applications, while saving up to 70 percent in maintenance costs.

WFS: What does Asysco see as a hurdle in the customer mindset?  How do you help them overcome that resistance?

JG: Because of perceived risks, most financial organizations are tentative when it comes to modernizing their current infrastructure.  Customers struggle to accept that the technology even exists to migrate their mainframe.  When we tell them that the entire conversion takes place automatically, they just can’t believe it.

These organizations realize that their dependence on the mainframe is an obstacle to remaining responsive to rapidly changing markets.  We help them re-evaluate the risk of migration by envisioning a system that can replace the mainframe and move them far beyond its limitations.

Most people look at a mainframe migration as a necessary evil.  It seems impossibly complex from the standpoint of scale and manageability, but to us, having done so many over the years, it is surprisingly simple to conceptualize the issue.  In fact, we have taken our experience a step further and developed a unique and highly successful project management framework that we apply to all of our migrations.  This framework, combined with our automated tools and customer centric philosophy, are our most valuable assets.

WFS: How are you working with Microsoft? (Mainframe Migration Alliance)

JG: Asysco is a partner of Microsoft’s Mainframe Migration Alliance, a group of companies that work together to help customers migrate workloads off the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. We’ve met the stringent testing requirements Microsoft has set for all its partners, proving that our solution was fully automated, and our modernizations can be completed quickly and accurately.

WFS: Can you provide an example of a customer
implementation?

JG: Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS), part of Lloyds TSB, migrated to AMT-LION in 2004.  They needed a change in business strategy to replace their existing infrastructure.  In 2008, Asysco helped them migrate to AMT-VS and a standard C# platform.  The Insurance and Investment division of HBOS gained significant performance and stability improvements, while substantially cutting costs.  The move to .NET means that when new products and e-commerce applications are required, it will be faster and easier to develop them.

WFS: Where do you see Asysco in the next 5 years?

JG: From a global standpoint we are reaching out to any organization with a Unisys mainframe that recognizes the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.  The next 3-5 years will be critical as we work with these companies to help them migrate and modernize.

From a business standpoint, we are in an aggressive growth phase due to the increased demand for migration solutions primarily stemming from the public and financial sectors.   Our long-term growth plan involves entering the ADABAS/Natural (IBM z-Series) market for which we are already in Beta testing and planning a full launch summer 2010.

We are confident that the same experience and philosophies that make Asysco successful in the Unisys marketplace will be an excellent fit for the ADABAS/Natural market too.