May 2005

Transoft transitions to MPE software

Migration company opens up its toolbox to 3000 sites

Most HP 3000 shops want to migrate themselves, if they’re leaving the platform at all. The 3000 marketplace has long demonstrated a healthy appetite for in-house projects, from application development to the heavy lifting of Y2K. This month Transoft, a company that has led turnkey application migrations for HP 3000 users since 2001, will put its software on the market for the 3000’s do it yourself managers.

“This is pretty much how we’ve worked most of our migration markets,” said CEO Paul Holland about Transoft selling its toolset. “Early in a migration market you tend to find organizations that are uneasy about remaining on the platform: the larger IT departments,” he added.

Such companies engage with a company like Transoft to do the migration project, he said. But over time, small to medium-sized companies — the bulk of the HP 3000 installed base — become aware of the potential problem of using technology no longer supported by the vendor.

“Their instinct,” Holland said, “particularly in the HP 3000 community, is ‘Can I do this job myself?’ We’re now reaching that point in time where the small- and medium-sized firms realize they need to do something.”

Transoft is offering tools which have acted as “serviceware,” Holland said, used in the company’s services group to do migrations for 3000 ISV Amisys, as well as HP 3000 customers at Steel Warehouse, L’Oreal Mexico, Arriva London and Blue Cross/Blue Shield Tennessee.

The company last made a proactive push of its tools to migrating sites in the Data General market in the late 1990s. The company derives about half of its revenue from software sales, including middleware and language products. Selling software for migrations to HP 3000 customers was matter of timing.

“We felt that bringing out this toolset in this timeframe would be a period when that impending deadline of 2006 was going to start getting people active,” he said.

While Transoft is not an HP Platinum migration partner, the company has a working agreement with North American Platinum firm MB Foster. Foster can use the Transoft tools in its migration engagements. The set of migration programs now being sold directly to HP 3000 customers rides under the brand name of Legacy Liberator.

The Legacy Liberator products for the HP 3000 market include:

• The Transoft Data Access Module (TDAM), which implements HP TurboIMAGE intrinsics on Windows, Unix and Linux. The software allows migration to RDBMS without changing IMAGE calls in programs.

• The Transoft MPE Library (TML) to implement HP MPE/iX intrinsics on Windows, Unix and Linux.

• Transoft’s Graphical Adapter (TGA), which implements HP 3000 VPlus intrinsics on Windows, Unix and Linux. This tool converts an application’s VPlus user interface to Web browser, GUI, or character-based alternatives without changing code in programs.

• Transoft Discovery Tool, used to parse a complete COBOL II application and display a graphical representation of the results as well as output a full report. This software provides a complete inventory of application components and itemizes all MPE/iX intrinsics used in the application code.

• A JCL Emulator, software that enables users to continue to run MPE Job Control Language (JCL) scripts migrated to another platform without changes to a script, as well as develop new scripts using JCL syntax.

• A JCL Converter which converts MPE’s JCL to a native Unix korn shell or Windows Visual Basic script.

• Transoft’s MPE COBOL Converter to move MPE’s COBOL II code to either Acucobol or Micro Focus COBOL.

Long experience, relationships

Transoft was founded in 1986 in the UK to migrate companies away from legacy systems and evolve legacy apps, starting with IBM and ICL mainframes before expanding to include Bull, Data General, Wang and Digital systems, as well as the IBM AS/400 and iSeries applications. Transoft supports 900 customers in 40 countries and is headquartered in the Atlanta area.

The company entered the HP 3000 market with an Application Transformation solution just six weeks before HP announced the end of its 3000 business in 2001. When it entered the HP 3000 space, Transoft said a study showed nearly half of 3000 users said the HP 3000 platform would not meet all their future technical requirements.

Transoft “has several projects in the pipe” working alongside MB Foster on HP 3000 migrations, Holland added. “We tried to have relationships with all the Platinum partners, but over time some of those companies decided to be less active in 3000 migrations. We communicate with Speedware, but we don’t have any situations where we’re working together at the moment.”

Speedware offers its own set of migration tools for HP 3000 sites, ranging from DBMotion database migration tool to the AMXW suite for migration to Windows or Unix.

In 2001 Transoft said it was offering “the first complete transformation solution combining selective migration and re-use of existing code and data with modernization.” Presentations from Transoft at user group meetings stress the company’s belief in transforming 3000 applications to native Unix, Linux or Windows technologies, often with Oracle or SQL Server to replace IMAGE.

The company also bridges COBOL alternatives with its partnerships with both AcuCOBOL and MicroFocus COBOL. Last year Transoft bought software from Accelr8 Technology in a deal to serve 400,000 OpenVMS customers running on Digital’s systems.

Tools offered elsewhere

The company has offered its Legacy Liberator toolset to other markets. These programs run in a PC-based Windows suite. Holland said the toolset has had its rule base refined over the course of completing HP 3000 migrations since 2002.

“The purpose of this tool suite is to largely automate the migration process,” he said. “You cannot ever, in our view, get a 100 percent migrated, press-the-button for every aspect of the MPE application. We’ve built up an extensive set of rules to drive that process, through the migrations we’ve done.”

Transoft will provide a Fast Start Service Package with each purchase of its tool suite. The package delivers up to two weeks of training in using the tools. “More importantly, we actually go through mentoring sessions on their code, so by the end of two weeks we’ve touched all aspects of the migration on their applications.”

Fast Start also includes a mapping section to understand the process for a company’s migration project. Transoft’s Pathfinder studies will map out specifics for a migration project, the recommended starting point.

Some HP 3000 customers show a willingness to just dive in without such preliminaries, Holland said. “We remain an advisor to these organizations through the project,” he said. Pathfinder is an additional series of workshops which precede Fast Start services.

The Legacy Liberator tools “offer an option to the market, but we are not in any way getting out of the services business. If an organization wants the least risk of achieving a quality migration, it’s probably better to outsource it in partnership. We have to work with the organization.”

“Some firms would like to control the pace of the migration more,” he explained. “They can nibble away at it with these tools.” The software is priced according to a customer’s number of items to migrate, Holland said.