For some of us, the past is a foreign country, where things are done differently. For many enterprises, it’s the future that represents an unknown destination, and the method of getting there has yet to be decided. Take Empire Life, for example.
Like many mainframe customers, this Canadian insurance giant has built a 40 year investment – a business system in COBOL that supports their customers with the services they need. The challenge they faced was to equip themselves for the next 40 years by adopting a modern deployment infrastructure, development processes, and tools.
This journey would also take them away from the mainframe. Grace Kennedy, VP, Business Solutions Delivery, explains; “[Mainframe scalability] came with a price tag that we just couldn’t justify anymore. It was clear to us that we needed to move off the mainframe from a support simplification and cost perspective. However, with over 40 years of business intelligence residing on the mainframe, this was no easy undertaking and we needed to be completely confident of success.”
Perfect partner
Following a detailed analysis of the market, with input from Gartner, they chose Micro Focus as their partner.
Enterprise Developer provided a modern development environment. This market-leading toolset runs in Eclipse or Visual Studio, enabling customers to develop mainframe applications for deployment to the IBM mainframe, or rehosted using Enterprise Server. Unlike other tools, Enterprise Developer supports off-host application coding and testing and can be easily integrated into a modern, agile development process.
Enterprise Server replaced the IBM mainframe, modernizing the deployment infrastructure. This flexible deployment environment is used by more than 600 customers worldwide. It supports the rehost of traditional mainframe COBOL and PL/I applications to Linux, UNIX or Windows Servers running standalone, virtualized or in a private or public cloud.
Having successfully implemented Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Server, Empire Life are ready for the next 40 years of business innovation. The journey has begun. See how they prepared their travel plans here.
Find out more about the most exciting Enterprise update yet by listening to the launch webinar:
