Business Challenge Fiserv Inc., provides information management systems and services to the financial industry, including transaction processing, outsourcing, business process outsourcing and software and systems solutions. The company serves more than 13,000 clients worldwide, including client relationships with over 7,800 financial institutions, 240 million customer deposits, loan and lease accounts and 847 million electronic/ATM/POS transactions and a billion checks processed annually. Fiserv VISION, a business unit of Fiserv Inc., serves over 260 clients across the US, providing financial institutions with a complete online banking solution. Fiserv VISION, engaged Progeni for an extensive re-platforming project. Processing over one billion transactions annually for 7.6 million accounts, Fiserv VISION needed to complete its transition without disrupting its clients’ daily activities.
Solution The project consisted of migrating 2,700 programs, 4.1 million lines of mixed Progeni 1Spec and COBOL source code (equivalent to 10 + million lines of pure COBOL) from the de-emphasizes Unisys V series machine to a Unisys ClearPath platform. This project had an estimated timeframe of 25 months. Progeni was to apply their automated software tools, provide support services, and furnish software products and Unisys A series and NT verb sets.
The customer’s objectives for the conversion project were to:
- Minimize freeze times for individual process batches
- Minimize the time required for post conversion processes
- Minimize changes to facilitate code recognition by maintenance coders
- Minimize changes and impact on Fiserv VISION customers
- Improve future portability
After a complete inventory Fiserv VISION and Progeni staff agreed to a project implementation strategy and time-line. Progeni used 1Spec, for maintaining and extending the life of mission-critical legacy applications. A single program specification can be used to generate code for any target machine, or multiple target machines.
Progeni undertook the following:
- Automated code scanning
- Platform specific syntax conversion
- Conversion for compilation under ANSI 85 COBOL
- Customization of Progeni's standard Verbs to interface with Fiserv VISION’s custom MCS
- Conversion of Fiserv VISION's own custom Verbs
- Restructuring of program flow & methods of processing to provide equivalent new platform functionality
- Converting V specific flat file handling processes to Progeni Spec, for generating equivalent flat filing processes for ClearPath
Code processing was undertaken in batches most suitable for testing as a set, prior to the massive parallel full system testing undertaken at the end. Fiserv VISION and Progeni handed over the final batch on the very day set for its delivery just twenty-five months earlier.
|