Case Studies
Overview
Without the right solution, mainframe migration can be very challenging. We take great pride in delivering successful projects for referenceable customers.
Together with our partners, Heirloom Computing works with some of the biggest companies in the world. Our customers are typically in the Financial Services & Business verticals. We also work directly with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who deliver commercial applications to multiple industries.
Below is a representative selection of case studies and customer testimonials. We do not publish the name of our clients if we are restricted by a partner NDA, or we do not have the client’s permission.
Financial Services
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“The system was custom built in the 1980s, and the design was extremely complex. Despite the complexity and high-transaction counts, the system was successfully replatformed to AWS, where it has been in production since June 2020. This has been a hugely impressive implementation that has enabled Venerable to adhere to its cloud-first strategy.” Tim Billow, EVP & CIO, Venerable |
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INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
| Insurance | Venerable is a business with well-established, strategic investors, experienced in successfully building and growing insurance businesses with patient, long-term capital. |
Replatforming of Agent Management System (AMS) on AWS Cloud to implement a cloud-first strategy and establish an acquisition engine.
The target workload was the Agent Management System (AMS), which provided core business-critical functions for commission calculations, payment generation, license validation, supplemental compensation, accounting, and statements. Inventory: 3.8M LOC, COBOL, Assembler, CICS, JCL, VSAM, Db2, RACF, MQ. Duration: 16 months. |
Probe™ for application discovery and inventory analysis. Heirloom® for code replatforming and data migration.
Project implementation was led by Cognizant, along with Heirloom Solution Architects and Venerable SMEs. |
AMS replatformed as a cloud-native application running on a highly-available AWS infrastructure.
Project completed 8 months ahead of schedule. The IBM Mainframe was decommissioned. $1M per month in savings which cut OPEX by more than 80%. |
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“Given the size and complexity of the processing, we were astonished that the replatformed system was processing requests within 3 months of the project start date.” Satu Koskinen, CIO, Arek Oy |
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INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
| Pensions | Arek builds, maintains, and develops common information system services required for pension insurance.
Arek is the sole provider of pension calculations to all of Finland’s pension providers. |
Replatforming of a very large pension calculation workload to a private cloud with sub-second response time requirements.
The pension calculation engine is used by all of Finland’s pension providers. Inventory: 22M LOC COBOL, PL/I, Assembler, IMS, MQ. Duration: 9 months. |
Probe™ for application discovery and inventory analysis. Heirloom® for code replatforming and data migration.
Project implementation was led by Accenture, with infrastructure services provided by Tietoevery, along with Heirloom Solution Architects, Azul engineers, and Arek SMEs. |
The pension calculation engine was deployed as a Spring Boot service on a dynamically scalable Kubernetes cluster, managed by Google Anthos.
The first-ever successful mainframe migration in Finland. Cost savings are projected to exceed 80%. A 4-pod cluster outperformed the original mainframe system by 152% with average response times of < 700ms. Accenture Case Study (Summary) |
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“Our high-value Enterprise Payment Platform processes volumes for banks of all sizes, especially larger institutions. Heirloom gave us the flexibility and control to deliver on our strategy.” Jim Gillespie, Head of Digital & High-Value Payments, ACI Worldwide |
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INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
| FinTech, Banking | ACI Worldwide provides a mission-critical real-time electronic payments platform to 19 of the world’s top 20 banks and 80,000 merchants, processing 225+ billion consumer transactions annually. | Modernization of electronic payments application platform processing $14+ trillion in payments and securities transactions each day to enable application deployment to agile infrastructure and distribution of services through new digital channels.
Inventory: COBOL, C, Java, SQL. Duration: 9 months. |
Using Heirloom®, the Enterprise Payment Platform application was replatformed from the IBM platform to the JVM running on commodity x86 Linux hardware.
Project implementation was performed by the client application SMEs with support from Heirloom Solution Architects. |
Along with the migration to an agile platform, cost reduction and improving performance were considered critical success factors.
The cost of infrastructure required for the application was cut by 70%, delivering a significantly more cost-effective solution for customers and improving margins for the client. |
Business
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“Heirloom’s no-excuses approach, exceptional software, and technical expertise helped us successfully migrate to an agile platform, enabling us to significantly enhance the value to our customers.” Erling Brækkan, CEO AutoData |
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INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
| Retail | Vitec Autodata is the leading supplier of ERP systems to the car and transport industry in Norway. | Replatforming of Vitec Autodata’s core z/VSE software trading platform for wholesales, retailers, and buyers of automotive spare parts.
Inventory: 4.9M LOC COBOL, Assembler, RPG, 500GB VSAM datasets |
Probe™ for application discovery and inventory analysis. Heirloom® for code replatforming and data migration.
Project implementation was led by Vitec Autodata, along with Heirloom Solution Architects and other technical staff. |
Application was migrated to a private cloud executing on the JVM under the Apache Tomcat application server.
All VSAM datasets were migrated to Microsoft SQL Server. Existing system was enhanced during the migration to deliver significant new features & capabilities to Vitec Autodata’s clients. |
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“The Avon Company’s decision to decommission the mainframe was driven by a business imperative to exit the data center business. At the same time, we had to ensure that the integrity of the business-critical batch processing from IMIS was retained. Heirloom Computing’s cloud-native solution delivered on all the requirements with ease.” Rick Boyle, VP Information Technology, The Avon Company |
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INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
| Retail | The Avon Company connects people through beauty, sharing passion, innovation, and expertise – affordably. | Replatforming of the Integrated Marketing Information System (IMIS).
IMIS is a bespoke system for managing marketing campaigns and distribution of collateral. Inventory: 1.3M LOC COBOL, Assembler, CICS, Db2, MQ. Duration: 7 months. |
Probe™ for application discovery and inventory analysis. Heirloom® for code replatforming and data migration.
Project implementation was led by Cognizant, along with Heirloom Solution Architects and Avon application SMEs. |
IMIS was replatformed to the JBoss application server and IBM UDB running on an AWS cloud infrastructure.
The IBM Mainframe was decommissioned. OpEx was reduced by 65%. |
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“Heirloom’s platform and outstanding project team delivered on the promise of automatically transforming and deploying a complex mainframe workload to the JVM in 90 days.” Tim Schwab, Director of Enterprise Applications, OCLC |
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INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
| Information | OCLC is a global library cooperative supporting thousands of libraries around the world. | Replatforming of mission-critical online and batch applications as part of a strategic imperative to enhance business agility and shut down the IBM Mainframe.
Inventory: COBOL, CICS, JCL, RACF. Duration: 3 months. |
Applications were replatformed with Heirloom® to JBoss Application Servers running on Red Hat Linux hosted on VMware instances. | OCLC realized an ROI in 6 months.
The IBM Mainframe was decommissioned. See the Press Release. |
INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
| Cloud Service Provider | Amazon Web Services | A joint project with AWS to deliver a “Mainframe Application in the Cloud” showcase.
The primary objective was to create a cloud-native implementation of an OLTP workload that leveraged the elasticity of AWS. Duration: 6 weeks. |
Heirloom developed a strict implementation of the industry-standard transaction processing benchmark, based on the TPC-C specification.
This COBOL/CICS application was run on an IBM Mainframe and then replatformed (without any code changes) to AWS with Heirloom® and deployed to Apache Tomcat clusters (in a scalable AWS Beanstalk environment). |
Monolithic OLTP application was successfully deployed as a cloud-native (dynamically scalable, highly-available, integrated) application on AWS.
Transaction throughput measured at 1,108 transactions per second, equivalent to 15,200 MIPS. Annual infrastructure cost was 45X cheaper than equivalent IBM Mainframe system. |
Government
INDUSTRY |
CLIENT |
PROJECT |
SOLUTION |
RESULTS |
European Government |
Social Security agency. |
Replatforming multi-district fraud and benefits processing application from the IBM Mainframe to a private cloud.Inventory: 17,900 MIPS, 35M LOC, 35GB EBCDIC data.Duration: 7 months. |
The application code was automatically recompiled to the JVM using Heirloom® with no code changes required to the original COBOL application. Relational data was migrated to the System Integration partner’s in-memory distributed SQL database.The application was deployed to a converged infrastructure platform running Linux with 128-cores. |
Batch transaction processing rate of 4,400 transactions per second, with an average response time of 120ms.Results verified as 100% accurate. |