Challenge

Enterprise S.p.A. runs a core business application on the IBM mainframe environment Pr.E.M.I.A., which manages every kind of interbank relationship, specifically in payments, trade finance, precious metals, and currency treasury. Enterprise S.p.A. maintained this software directly on the client’s mainframe environment. This has caused version control issues, with clients operating on different versions of the software, leading to different support requirements and the potential for human error. As client business requirements are becoming more sophisticated, Enterprise S.p.A. recognized the need to respond to enhancements requests and maintenance requirements more efficiently. It wanted to have direct control of the development and testing of this flagship software to help shorten the time-to-market for new releases and to make the installation process more reliable and predictable.

Marco Spuntarelli, Client Manager at Enterprise S.p.A., explains: "We looked into purchasing our own mainframe partition to run Pr.E.M.I.A., but we didn’t feel this was a cost effective option for us and so we looked for alternatives."

Solution

Following a market evaluation, the Micro Focus Enterprise solution was highlighted as a good fit for Enterprise S.p.A and as a result, this solution was chosen. With the support of the Micro Focus services team, the implementation was completed within a two month timeframe allowing Enterprise S.p.A. to deploy the tools to the development teams ensuring rapid adoption and immediate productivity gains.

Enterprise Developer® has brought a number of useful features. The integrated development environment in Eclipse is particularly appreciated. As each developer has their own development environment. This means technicians can modify the same source code with fewer conflicts, which is critical in a parallel development environment. The smart COBOL editing feature has improved developer efficiency as code syntax errors are detected and fixed automatically without having to wait for code compilation. A local CICS test environment allows the developer to test application changes in isolation without impacting other users or consume mainframe resources.

Spuntarelli comments: “Compared to similar development tools in a pure mainframe environment, we felt that Micro Focus Enterprise Developer offered us an efficient debugging environment which helps us speed up the delivery of new modules and provide fixes if we need them.”

Enterprise Test Server® provides a mainframe test execution environment which runs on Windows. This allows more cost-effective application testing. It also supports scalable functional testing and provides a demo or prototyping environment for clients.

Results

Having an in-house development and test environment has brought Enterprise S.p.A. and its clients many benefits, as Spuntarelli explains: “The Micro Focus solution has given us more extensive reporting capabilities, which means we don’t have to rely on business analysts. The instance of DB2 on the distributed development environment is easier for us to access and we have noticed that test phases can be shortened in the new environment.”

Development productivity is improved because Enterprise S.p.A. is able to analyze the impact of changes. It can avoid issuing conflicting releases of its software, and is able to semi-automatically resolve conflicts on parallel development on the same software module.

Spuntarelli concludes: “We have a more agile development process which has improved our team collaboration, increasing our developer productivity. Micro Focus has helped us respond to new business demands more quickly, improving our time-to-market by an estimated 20% by being able to focus on development and testing, rather than software maintenance tasks. We are really pleased with the solution and look forward to our continued success with Micro Focus.”