Caisse Régionale Interprofessionnelle de Retraite pour le Personnee (CRIREP)
About CRIREP & SLPA
Caisse Régionale Interprofessionnelle de Retraite pour le Personnee (CRIREP) is based in Metz, Eastern France and provides pension and retirement funds management services, primarily to workers in the steel industry in the area. One of its subsidiaries SLPA, shared the ICL mainframe until January 2005 when it separated its workload onto a new machine.
Project CRIREP
In February 2004 the decision was taken to migrate the workload of the CRIREP/SLPA combined mainframe to a new Windows environment using the OpenSCL migration tool. The company’s motivation was that the existing ICL mainframe had reached the end of its life cycle and the company was faced with the prospect of a either an expensive hardware upgrade or the rapid deployment of software packages.
Both alternatives were rejected in favour of a decision to move decades of investment in the legacy backend to a Windows system using OpenSCL.
Project SLPA
When the decision was taken to migrate the applications, it was also agreed that the workload of the SLPA subsidiary, a health insurance business, would be split from the ICL mainframe onto its own discrete system. Again EuroSMW employed the OpenSCL solution to migrate the VME-based applications and data to the new Windows environment. With both migration projects running in parallel the new system went live on time in November 2004, enabling the mainframe to be removed.
About EuroSMW
EuroSMW is EBE Computing’s preferred partner across Western Europe for the OpenSCL migration solution. It was established by ex-ICL/Fujitsu employees with extensive mainframe expertise, who saw a need to address the migration requirements of mainframe users in the territory. Located on the border of France and Germany they are uniquely placed to help their customers install and use EBE Computing’s OpenSCL solution.
As a result of their combined efforts CRIREP and SLPA now use the OpenSCL migrated environment:
· CRIREP had been using an ICL Mainframe since 1972 for managing and paying pensions and salaries of the Lorraine steel industry
· SLPA started using CRIREP’s Mainframe early in the 1980s for managing the company’s Health insurance activity. SLPA is a subsidiary of CRIREP
· SLPA needed to spilt its workload from CRIREP at the 1st January 2005 in view of the expected takeover of its parent company
· As SLPA is a very small company (only 7 staff) it was not feasible to continue to assume the costs and the skills needed to continue running the mainframe
· ICL advised the organisation of the cessation of hardware support for the Series 39 mainframes at 1st January 2005. CRIREP was given one year’s notice
· At the same time CRIREP had been advised that they are to merge with another French Pensions company named Groupe Malakoff. Merging operations have been planned from December 2004 until November 2005. Groupe Malakoff also announced that it was to retain the CRIREP systems for 5 years
· The alternative proposed by ICL to CRIREP/SLPA was to upgrade to a Fujitsu Nova-series mainframe, at considerable incremental expense to the organisation
· Since running mission-critical backend applications on unsupported hardware was not an option, CRIREP/SLPA could not get away by “doing nothing”
· Options for maintaining continuing operations were narrowed down to three choices:
1. Upgrade to new ICL/Fujitsu mainframe(s)
2. Implement packaged solutions
3. Use OpenSCL to migrate to a Windows server platform.
CRIREP
|
RISK ANALYSIS |
1. ICL Hardware Upgrade |
2. Implement Package |
3. OpenSCL Migration |
|
Time of conversion |
Not required |
5 years |
<1 year |
|
Data Migration Included |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
|
Level of Risk |
Low |
High |
Low |
|
3-Year Economic Impact |
£4.5 mil |
Unknown |
<£1.5 mil |
SLPA
|
RISK ANALYSIS |
1. ICL Hardware Upgrade |
2. Implement Package |
3. OpenSCL Migration |
|
Time of conversion |
Not required |
4 years |
<1 year |
|
Data Migration Included |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
|
Level of Risk |
Low |
High |
Low |
|
3-Year Economic Impact |
£2 mil |
Unknown |
<£1 mil |
A five-year Return On Investment model clearly showed that migration was the least cost, lowest risk alternative. One of the main contributing factors was the fact that data storage and archiving can now be maintained on a PC instead of the mainframe. Also, the level and cost of skill required to maintain the new environment was much lower as mainframe skills were only available to this customer at a high premium. EuroSMW and EBE Computing started the migration in Feb 2004 and achieved completion with the machines being physically removed at the beginning of December 2004.