Responsibility paces 3000 migration costs
May 17, 2011
Swapping software tool costs for services engagements is one way to reduce the expense of a migration. When a company can use tools and do a migration themselves, taking responsibility for the accuracy of migrated code cuts costs.
Speedware believes that a company that takes full responsibility for the caliber of its migrated apps can save most of the cost of a fully-outsourced migration. In that latter model, Speedware's Chris Koppe said the company will do everything, “compared to the do it yourself approach, where you can save 90 percent of those costs.” An offer to the first 50 companies which contact the company to purchase the AMXW software suite will include those outsourced services, rewarding the early DIY companies with the added value of consulting.
Other vendors’ migration suites have fallen out of market consideration. Koppe pointed to Ed/Win from Ordina-Denkart, Legacy Liberator from Transoft and Unicon’s conversion tools as becoming footnotes in a search for 3000 DIY tools. While Unicon never sold its suite as a customer-only solution – it used its internal tools to convert COBOL — the other vendors combined software sales with training, the same combo Speedware will offer to the 50 companies.
AMXW is not a collection of scripts used in the back offices of Speedware for conversions, the company added. The suite was designed as a software product, notching early success at Expeditors International in 2003 when it helped retire 165 HP 3000s, and most recently at the Washington state college consortium, where an HP-UX replacement for 34 servers goes online this month.
COBOL is at the bull’s-eye of the target for AMXW. Speedware is the North American distributor for the commercial open source COBOL-IT, a COBOL replacement supported by AMXW that cuts the costs to switch away from COBOL II – which never had runtime fees.
Customers who respond to the offer will get a first consult to “put together the right timeline and scope,” Fisher said. “If they want to go beyond buying the product, we can put together whatever their training needs are, to help them get to their desired outcome. We definitely want to help customers if cost is a factor.”
Speedware will assist in moves from Powerhouse and other languages, “but AMXW is primarily for COBOL and JCL” applications.