INDUSTRY :
Telecommunications
APPLICATION :
Amdocs billing application
SOLUTION :
COBOL-IT® Compiler Suite Enterprise Edition
COBOL-IT® Developer Studio
PREVIOUS ENVIRONMENT :
HP-UX UNIX
Micro Focus COBOL
Tuxedo Application Server
Pro*C
Pro*COBOL
Oracle 11g
Sycnsort
“C”
NEW ENVIRONMENT :
RedHat Linux
COBOL-IT Compiler Suite Enterprise Edition
ICC “C” compiler
Tuxedo Application Server
Pro*C
Pro*COBOL
Oracle 11g
Syncsort
“C”
Pelephone, a leading provider of cellular communications services in Israel migrated its Amdocs billing system to Linux and chose COBOL-IT as their new COBOL compiler. The migration of the application from HP-UX UNIX servers to RedHat Linux servers took less than a year.
“The migration to COBOL IT met our technical and business requirements. There were no performance issues during the migration and we are very satisfied with COBOL-IT. We have received support throughout the process. In our tests, COBOL-IT produced identical calculations. Functionally, there were no differences between them.”
Tamir Peleg, Manager of Infrastructure Software Department
Pelephone Communications Ltd, provider of Cellular Communications Services
Pelephone is one of Israel’s largest cellular operators with yearly revenues of 3.4 Billion NIS (850M$) and net profit of 373M NIS (93M$). Pelephone has 2.58 million subscribers and 2,900 employees.
Pelephone is the leading operator in the business sector in Israel. Pelephone’s customers include: all government ministries and state employees, IBM, HP, Google, Health maintenance organizations, government hospitals, insurance companies and more…
Amdocs Ensemble, the Pelephone Software Application
Amdocs Ensemble was purchased in the early 2000’s to provide billing services to Pelephone’s growing number of customers. Pelephone has chosen to maintain and develop the system inhouse within the IT department instead of using Amdocs services. The application consists of millions of lines of “C” and COBOL code. The application written in COBOL consist of 900 programs containing close to 1.8 million lines of code.
Pelephone employs 30 programmers to maintain the application which includes SQL that is pre-processed with Pro*C and Pro*COBOL precompilers.
The decision to use COBOL-IT
Pelephone had been operating in an HP-UX environment using Micro Focus COBOL. In recent years, maintaining their application in UNIX has become extremely expensive. Pelephone decided to achieve their cost-saving requirements by migrating their application to Linux servers and by moving to COBOL-IT. Rewriting the application in “C” was considered, but this option was abandoned due to the high costs and risks. COBOL-IT proved to be the best choice. The migration went very smoothly. COBOL-IT matched the performance of Micro Focus and no changes in behavior were detected during extensive testing.
Pelephone served as the Systems Integrator for the project and outsourced the migration of “C” code to Amdocs experts. All COBOL migration and compilation was done by Pelephone. The entire code migration to RedHat Linux with COBOL-IT was completed in one year. Another six month were necessary for testing and runtime adjustments.
Pelephone decided to achieve their cost-saving requirements by migrating their application to Linux servers and by moving to COBOL-IT.
The Challenges
The most difficult part of the migration was designing and executing a detailed test plan on the RedHat Linux platform. It was critical to establish that the functionality of the new compiler was identical to the functionality of the Micro Focus compiler on the previous UNIX platform. During the migration, this close examination of the code allowed Pelephone to optimize the performance of the application. Aside from these improvements, the code transferred seamlessly from the UNIX to the Linux platform and the COBOL-IT compiler provided all of the necessary functionality.
“It was critical to Pelephone that this migration be completed within a window of opportunity and in order to do that, it was critical that the COBOL-IT compiler pass every test for compatibility and performance under extreme load tests. We were very pleased that Pelephone was able to achieve all of their objectives while improving the performance of their application.”
Stephane Croce. CEO COBOL-IT
| Challenge | Solution | Customer Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Rising costs using the previous Solution Stack. | Migrate application to RedHat Linux with COBOL-IT Compiler Suite Enterprise Edition. | Less upward pressure on pricing for the application. |
| Solution stack including Tuxedo, COBOL, "C", Oracle, Oracle precompilers and Syncsort. | Reconstruct solution stack on RedHat Linux seamlessly with COBOL-IT Compiler Suite. | Same functionality with cost savings to the provider. |
| Testing requirements to establish identical functionality with same or better performance. | Build and execute detailed test plan. | Seamless transition. No retraining costs associated with migration. |
To contact Pelephone :
Tamir Peleg
tamir@pelephone.co.il