St Helens MBC cuts its annual IT costs by 300K
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Micro Focus and MigrationWare migrated critical legacy applications from proprietary mainframe environments to the Microsoft Windows platform. St. Helens Council has realised the benefits of moving off the mainframe with an immediate £300,000 reduction in annual hardware and software costs.
St. Helens decided to move critical financial Accounts Payable and General Ledger applications to Windows, for two primary reasons. Firstly, the council had adopted Lotus Domino as a key component of their strategic IT platform and, second, the Council's Information Computing Technology (ICT) team had concluded that the mainframe environment would not provide a suitable long-term future for hosting a Domino-based architecture or meet the needs of the Council's long-term IT objectives.
As a result, St. Helens needed to consolidate all systems to a Windows and UNIX based infrastructure, to enable them to decommission the mainframe prior to renewal date of March 2005, to avoid ongoing mainframe hardware and software costs of approximately £300,000 per annum.
Using the services of MigrationWare, St. Helens converted the key MANTIS and COBOL mainframe systems, which they could not replace with packages, to new COBOL/CICS based applications to be deployed with Micro Focus Enterprise Server, one of the products collectively known as Micro Focus Server, on the Windows platform.
"With the migration approach there's no need to throw legacy applications away, instead they can be seen as assets to be re-used, in more modern and cost-effective environments." said Ste Sharples, ICT Business Manager, St. Helens Council. "We can now re-use, re-shape and re-mould the important systems and data built-up over many years on the mainframe."
"The mainframe migration project has enabled the Council to completely revolutionize the way we operate. All of St. Helens legacy systems have been replaced with packages or re-hosted using ground-breaking technologies providing contemporary capabilities for improved integration, to meet all the challenges of a modern council," said Cath Robinson, Assistant Treasurer (Audit, IT & Efficiency), St. Helens Council.
"Our expertise in language and database conversions along with the 'Lift and Shift' migration approach from Micro Focus is a compelling option for organizations like St. Helens who've made a strategic decision to move off the mainframe," said Mark Cooper, Director at MigrationWare.
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St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council
Microfocus
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