MICRO FOCUS TECHNOLOGY SAFEGUARDS LOCAL AUTHORITY DATA AND ELIMINATES ARCHIVING COSTS
NEWBURY, United Kingdom, Feb. 23, 2004 - Micro Focus International Ltd. (Micro Focus®) has facilitated the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in its migration from IBM Mainframe to client-server based packages, including council tax, non-domestic rates and housing benefits systems.
Many councils are currently implementing the migration of their mainframe to a server environment but are required, by law, to maintain records for up to 10 years. Windsor and Maidenhead's innovative approach has defined the way in which councils can preserve vital council data while eliminating development and retraining costs.
John Tordoff, Technical and Development Services Manager at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, commented, "The beauty of the Micro Focus solution is its ability to migrate data without modification of our legacy applications. As a result the pressure on the IT department was reduced, and the need for retraining on a new interface was eliminated. We are anticipating substantial cost savings from this approach to the migration."
Micro Focus solutions enabled the IT department at Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead to perfectly mirror the application, allowing the council continuous access to the data after its mainframe was shut down.
Kevin Brearley, Public Sector Manager, Micro Focus, commented, "Our aim is to cause as little disruption to the council as possible and preserve familiarity for the council employees using the systems. To all intents and purposes the users would never know they were not reading from the same mainframe that has been in place for the last 20 years."
Micro Focus technology has protected the integrity of data held by the council, including council tax, non-domestic rates and benefits records. This data is used for reference only and in order to preserve the integrity of the data, it has been migrated in a read-only format. In doing so the speed of access to legacy information is increased, the cost of maintaining the application in the long-term is reduced, and the purity of the data is maintained.
John Tordoff added, "We were looking for a safe and fast means of migrating onto the server. Micro Focus understands the value of our legacy COBOL applications and was able to offer us an innovative approach to reusing our existing assets. With one project, the entire environment will be transferred onto the server with no ongoing development or management necessary with the obvious saving in costs resulting."
Previously, organizations wishing to migrate their systems from the mainframe had three options; to develop their own in-house application to retain the data, to archive the material to microfiche, or to have it 'shoehorned' into a package. These methods have often resulted in corruption of data, or leaving the IT department taking on the role of a software house; constantly developing the system to cope whenever a query is made to retrieve data. By enabling its customers to maximize the value of their existing mission-critical applications the responsibility for creating a new system to access old data is removed.
Advances in technology mean that local authorities' applications can now be managed on normal Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers, thereby driving down development costs and space. The complete Windsor and Maidenhead mainframe environment was migrated from the existing IBM OS390 in a matter of weeks.
About Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead
The Royal Borough, with its blend of rich history and successful modern business development, covers 76 square miles, just 12 miles to the west of London. The main towns of Windsor, Maidenhead and Ascot are surrounded by 14 villages; all linked by a common thread- the River Thames.
One of the Borough's most important assets is large number of unspoiled rural areas, including 1,000 acres of National Trust land and 4,800 acres owned by the Crown. There is also a network of widely used public footpaths, bridleways and byways, which give access to the countryside and river The Royal Borough, home to Windsor Castle and with its close connections to the Royal Family, attracts millions of visitors every year - not only from countries across the world but also from throughout the United Kingdom.
About Micro Focus
Micro Focus is the fastest, most effective way to migrate, extend, develop and deploy enterprise applications. As the industry standard for COBOL, Micro Focus bridges business-critical legacy assets with Web services, J2EE, XML and .NET, enabling organizations to reduce costs, increase agility and minimize risk for accelerated business success. The company's software products for COBOL are among the most widely used in the industry with an estimated 130,000 COBOL developers producing applications used by more than 3,000,000 people around the world. Founded in 1976, Micro Focus is a global company with principal offices in the United Kingdom, United States and Japan. For more information, visit www.microfocus.com.
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