Major Retailer

Digital transformation required to become truly customer-centric

This retailer has a long history of successfully reinventing itself to adapt to shifting tastes, social values, and new technologies. After the decline of mail-order around 2008, ecommerce became a top priority with an objective to become a genuine omni-channel ecommerce leader in Europe. Their CIO explains further: “We felt restricted by our current mainframe-based COBOL technology and realized that to become truly customer-centric we would need to move at a much faster pace. Digital transformation would give us more agility and scalability and enable us to benefit from cloud deployment so that we can streamline our delivery model and achieve substantial cost savings. We wanted to transition development activities to our delivery center in Portugal and needed to introduce a modern development environment that would support this move.”

The organization found a partner that supports companies in transforming technological innovations into real-life use cases. This expertise would be useful for the modernization journey. It was agreed that the basis of its modernization program would be to replace mainframe applications with new, more modern, software, reuse existing business rules by re-platforming into a more flexible environment, and audit all components so that redundant elements can be retired securely. The scope of the project included sales, products, logistics, and finance applications. The partner recommended COBOL-IT, now wholly owned by OpenText™, who offer a proven, open source-based platform for COBOL applications.

By re-platforming some of our business-critical applications and functions with COBOL-IT solutions, and then moving them to a cloud environment, we can now boost our innovation by leveraging data and processes, focusing on application development, while significantly reducing our OPEX costs.

COBOL-IT successfully meets black friday deadline

Introducing a 100 percent open source run-time stack consisting of PostgreSQL to replace DB2, and COBOL-IT developer studio to convert IBM COBOL code, together with an automated CI/CD toolchain including Git, Jenkins, and Puppet, has created a design that allows much faster progress through the development cycle. The tools help isolate COBOL-related code issues and can quickly resolve these. The COBOL-IT tools can be used separately or together to complete development tasks and validate changes before moving to the build stage. The COBOL-IT Data Displayer component replaces time-consuming programming tasks with the ability to easily browse, display, and modify data. The code coverage module provides statistical and visual guides to the lines of code that have been executed in a test run. The profiler element returns information about execution paths and performance: measuring elapsed and CPU time spent in COBOL code as well as in external applications such as databases.

“We felt that the performance and scalability needed to manage peaks, such as season sales or special events, would be best served by moving our key applications to a public cloud environment, leveraging Linux and the COBOL-IT open source solutions,” comments the CIO.

The implementation team had a deadline of black friday to make the cut over to the new environment. Testing showed that the batch window would be able to manage the increase in data volumes and calculation requirements associated with black friday. The system was migrated in time and the retailer was able to take advantage of twice the mainframe CPU capacity within the cloud environment. This meant that black friday had twice the required capacity, minimizing any risk of customers experiencing downtime, at just a fraction of the infrastructure cost.

We felt that the performance and scalability needed to manage peaks, such as season sales or special events, would be best served by moving our key applications to a public cloud environment, leveraging Linux and the COBOL-IT open source solutions.

Unified development, streamlined processes, and advanced data analytics

The non-production environment, used for testing purposes, now does not require mainframe resources and benefits from DevOps practices, improving time-to-market, and enhancing software quality, while offering virtually unlimited scalability. The new environment has unified development teams and processes. It has streamlined and simplified daily operational tasks for faster delivery and project completion. The system is open, with actionable data which is fed into Artificial Intelligence solutions for advanced data analytics to support data-driven decision-making at a corporate level. Integration with event-driven micro services provides real-time access to critical information

The CIO concludes: “By re-platforming some of our business-critical applications and functions with COBOL-IT solutions and then moving them to the cloud, we can now boost our innovation by leveraging data and processes, focusing on application development, while significantly reducing our OPEX costs. The new system brings agility, flexibility, scalability, and other benefits offered by open source software and the cloud.”