USA Truck Drives Business Improvement with In-House IBM Mainframe Application Migration

Rockville, MD, June 12, 2012

Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application modernization, testing, and management solutions, today announced that USA Truck, Inc., a leading truckload carrier, has completed the move of its bespoke mainframe application portfolio to a virtualized Microsoft Windows Server. By shutting down the mainframe and running the mainframe applications within Micro Focus’ Enterprise Server environment, the company has reduced operating costs associated with the suite.

The U.S. transportation industry is highly competitive and customer satisfaction is critical. As pressures increase to meet expanded service level agreements (SLAs) under shrinking timelines, companies must offer freight solutions that are safe, modern, and reliable. For Arkansas-based USA Truck, Inc., this is especially true. The company operates one of the nation’s largest over-the-road full truckload fleets transporting general commodities throughout the continental U.S, as well as into and out of Canada and Mexico. In its 28 years of business, USA Truck has built up a substantial mainframe application footprint with a suite of homegrown applications performing critical HR, financial, and industry-specific functions including accounts payable and receivable, payroll, recruitment and equipment maintenance. The applications are sophisticated, involving over 28 million lines of COBOL code and over 1,000 screens. While each application functioned well on the IBM mainframe the operating costs of hosting on the mainframe, compared with the costs of its portfolio of packages on Windows, simply did not make business sense.

“Our IT team knows how important costs are in this company, so when they suggested we could reduce operating expenses with a migration project they immediately had my attention,” said Darron Ming, Executive VP & CFO, USA Truck, Inc. “We were able to use our existing development team to carry out the project. The team delivered on time and on budget, which was a remarkable achievement given they had never undertaken such a project before.”

The applications also provided business services essential to the company’s day-to-day operations. For this reason, it was critical that the move to a new platform was transparent to all the end-users and that other systems reliant on the various mainframe application services remained unscathed. Using Micro Focus Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Server, the company rehosted its entire application portfolio from its IBM mainframe and moved all 1.5 terabytes of data held in DB2 on z/OS to Microsoft SQL Server. The entire migration was conducted in-house and the transition over to the migrated systems was smooth.

“Migrating mainframe applications to contemporary, cost-effective platforms is a proven modernization strategy that helps reduce costs while enabling IT to become more agile," said Steve Biondi, President of North America, Micro Focus. “What’s so impressive about USA Truck is that the migration project was instigated and delivered entirely by the company’s existing in-house IT team – demonstrating what’s possible if migration is approached with the right attitude and tools.”

Micro Focus Enterprise Developer gives organizations the ability to dramatically cut the cost of maintaining enterprise applications. It also gives organizations a way to increase development agility and reduce the time needed to put new applications or features into the hands of the users.

Micro Focus Enterprise Server provides the deployment environment for applications that have traditionally functioned only in a mainframe environment to operate on a broader range of platforms. This solution ensures that existing mainframe applications can be made available with little or no change to underlying code.

Additional information on USA Truck's mainframe migration is available here.

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About Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization, Testing and Management software enables customers' business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com.

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