Quipoz

MSD to 're-platform' Swiftt benefits system to Java

The legacy Swiftt social welfare benefits system and its companion beneficiary information system, Trace, will be transferred to a Java platform by early 2009.

The Ministry of Social Development plans to make the move using an Australian-developed "transformation engine" that will automate much of the switch-over, says the ministry's CIO, Tim Occleshaw. The new system will have the same functionality as the old.

Swiftt (Social Welfare Information for Tomorrow Today) was developed in the mid-1990s for the then-Department of Social Welfare, using the Unisys Linc programming language. Trace was added later, to help combat benefit abuse.

Various options for upgrading or redeveloping the system were canvassed around 2003 and costed at between $78 million and $180 million. The cost of the "replatforming" exercise will be "a fraction of those figures", Occleshaw says. He declines to give any closer estimate as "a number of commercially confidential arrangements are still to be concluded".

It is also a "surprisingly low risk" option, he says, because of the automated translation and the decision not to change functionality. "The business case put to Cabinet demonstrates that [the exercise] will pay for itself several times over within the next five years," he says.

To decrease risk further, there will also be a long parallel-running period, when the old systems will be kept alive in case of any problems with the new one. The ministry has already experimentally migrated parts of Trace into Java objects without difficulty, says Occleshaw.

The automatic migration tool is from Quipoz, which is based in Sydney. Quipoz claims it generates a set of business rules and other system documentation automatically, as well as new code.

As a first step, Quipoz says, the transformation engine checks the legacy code for redundant or inconsistent elements and then transforms it to an intermediary Wide Spectrum Language (WSL). This, in turn, is transformed to an industry-standard environment, which is usually J2EE, but .Net code can also be generated, says Quipoz.

The ministry's transformation of the Swiftt and Trace code is expected to be completed within 18 months, says Occleshaw. Transformation into Java fits with a general policy to "go more mainstream" in applications, so as to exploit opportunities to interface with package software written to widely recognised standards, he says.

The ministry has also recently finished the main development stage of its client management system, based on the Irish package software suite Cùram. Deployment to regional offices and training courses is expected to occur by the middle of next year.

Read the full article at http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/DDB08340DDE7A85FCC2573950009DFEF

MSD starts to move software off mainframes

The Social Development Ministry is attempting to wean itself off its expensive mainframe computers and aging Cobol software without having to spend tens of millions of dollars completely rewriting its software applications.

Chief information officer Tim Occleshaw says the ministry will spend a little over $2 million translating its Trace debt management system - the smaller of its two legacy software applications - from Cobol to Java.

It is using Q-TE, a "self-learning" software transformation engine developed by Australian company Quipoz, to do this.

"The project has already commenced and we expect to have the migration of Trace complete by the second quarter of next year," he says.

"It is quite an exciting piece of work. Obviously there is a huge amount of testing required when you do something like that, but the beauty of the approach and the reason it is low risk, is we can run both systems in parallel. We don't need to take users off the mainframe system until we are completely satisfied the replacement system is absolutely right."

Automated translation tools are a low-cost means of moving software applications that don't need to be substantially changed on to cheaper hardware and modern software architectures, though work is required to ensure that software functions as it should once it has been translated.

The process of translating software always leads to some loss of efficiency that can normally be compensated for by running it on more modern, cheaper computers.

If the project is successful, the ministry will be able to move Trace off its Unisys Clearpath mainframes on to cheap Unix servers, and to an Oracle database. The ministry would then look at using the same approach to translate its core Swiftt application, which handles the job of paying beneficiaries.

"Swiftt is a good system but it is expensive to run," Mr Occleshaw says.

"If this pilot is successful we would be raising a business case which would be subject to ministerial and possibly Cabinet approval."

The ministry bought its Clearpath mainframes in 2003 for $12.1 million after trading-in two older mainframes it was forced to buy in an unplanned $30 million purchase in 2000.

Once Trace is translated into Java, it should be cheaper to maintain and cheaper and quicker to adapt to meet the requirements of new legislation.

Mr Occleshaw says Inland Revenue is watching the project. It also faces the task of migrating off legacy systems over the next few years.

Quipoz is acting as a subcontractor to the ministry's IT infrastructure provider EDS New Zealand on the project.

Mr Occleshaw says there was "only one choice" of supplier as the work required familiarity with the ministry's legacy systems.

"Clearly it had to be EDS doing the work for us and it was EDS - with input from ourselves - that chose Quipoz."

Quipoz was founded in January 2002. Its customers include Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank.

The ministry has meanwhile pushed the introduction of its $54 million Curam case management system back by a month to the end of August.

Mr Occleshaw says this is so staff can access more functions as soon as the system goes live, rather than having to wait till a second release of the software is available next year.

Read the full article at http://stuff.co.nz/4153151a28.html

Bravura sings a new tune with Sonata application suite

From legacy to single architecture

In a bid to be more agile, wealth management firm Bravura Solutions Ltd has transformed its old client server environment by moving to a Java platform and developing a new Web-based product suite dubbed Sonata.

Bravura has transformed its Talisman wealth applications products from PowerBuilder and Sybase platforms, into Java, JSF (Java Server Faces) and Oracle platforms.

The project was undertaken by Quipoz, an Australian provider of legacy software transformation services.

Quipoz director of insurance and financial services Mark Midwinter said the Talisman software has been re-engineered to comply with a more strategic architecture.

"This will enable them to maintain the new application with fewer resources and add new function more rapidly," Midwinter said.

"Ultimately this improved efficiency will benefit the end users."

Talisman software is now part of the Sonata suite of applications and is used for the administration of wrap platforms, master trusts, retail and wholesale unit trusts, and retirement products.

In coming months, Talisman will undergo assessment services through a joint testing facility established by Bravura Solutions and IBM in China.

Earlier this year the Sonata suite of applications became certified under IBM's Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) and a version of Sonata is already in use.

Bravura CEO Iain Dunstan said the organization wanted to undertake and most efficient and cost-effective means of merging all of its IT into a common architecture, while preserving business logic.

"Going forward, working from a single integrated architecture will radically improve our product speed to market, as well as our ability to deploy legislative changes more efficiently," Dunstan said.

"Unlike the traditional approaches to upgrading older systems, which involve considerable risk and cost, the Quipoz transformation methodology costs substantially less and is achieved with reduced risk."

Updating history for use today

"Legacy system" is a widely used computer term that unkindly refers to software in its dotage, usually on a mainframe, that just won't go away.

Many big organisations around the world first computerised in the 1960s or '70s. There was little packaged software and people usually developed their own applications. These were generally written in the popular computer languages of the day, such as Cobol (COmmon Business Oriented Language), Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) or PL/1 (Programming Language One). There were many others.

Legacy systems were not called that when they were written, of course. Thirty or 40 years ago they were written by programmers fresh out of university or the Control Data programming school ("Pay us $2000 and you'll have a job for life") using cutting-edge technology. Few people believed the systems they were writing would still be in use in their children's and even grandchildren's day.

The whole Y2K scare was caused by legacy systems and the way they usually expressed dates using only the last two digits of the year. This meant that as the calendar ticked over from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 2000, they would subtract 99 years from their internal clocks, rather than add one year, with potentially disastrous consequences for time-dependent systems such as debtors and supply chain management.

Many legacy systems were ripped out at this time but many remain. They have evolved over the years, been patched up and debugged and combined with newer software, giving rise to another widely used term - "spaghetti code" - to describe the complexity of the software and the difficulty of tracing your way through its logical paths.

That is a big problem for many organisations. The cost of simply dumping and rewriting these applications is too high. Most organisations evolve away from them over time, but they must make do with what they have, and manage large amounts of old software code.

Their legacy systems are usually running in applications that are critical to their businesses. They are usually undocumented, and the people who wrote them are long gone, often to the big coding shop in the sky.

Few new programmers are being trained in the black arts of Cobol programming and hierarchical data structures, and the owners of legacy systems must struggle through as best they can.

In recent years a small industry has grown to develop these legacy systems into more up-to-date applications. There are many ways to do this, from total rewrites to line-by-line trawling through old code and replacing it with new. Many people have tried to automate the process, with software tools that automatically replace old code with new.

This is the approach taken by Sydney-based Quipoz, which has attracted some important organisations with its novel approach to rebuilding legacy code.

Quipoz (the name comes from the Quipu, the Inca numbering knot) has developed some clever software that takes legacy code and transforms it into intermediate logic before rewriting it into a modern system.

The Quipoz Transformation Engine - Q-TE, or "cutie" - uses "walkers", software agents that walk through old Cobol or PL/1 or any other legacy language. The walkers extract the underlying business rules and data models, creating a "logic tree" - a diagram of a program's underlying structure - which is rebuilt in C# or Java or virtually any modern programming language.

Quipoz chief technology officer Don Tonkin calls himself something of a legacy system. He was involved with mainframe computers for nearly 40 years. In that time he's seen it all, and he and his colleagues have a wealth of practical knowledge in real-world software applications that can only come with experience.

"There are plenty of companies redeveloping old software," Mr Tonkin says. "But we believe Quipoz has a higher level of automation. Most other systems require a fair bit of manual coding, but with Quipoz we've developed a way of extracting all the underlying logic and turning it into a wide-spectrum language based on business rules, which can then be converted into any other language."

It does this, Mr Tonkin explains, by using several different "software mining" techniques, in which latter-day programmers dig into old source code to divine the original authors' intent. Much of the expertise they used in building Quipoz's transformation tools was developed during Y2K conversion exercises in the late 1990s.

"The beauty of our approach is that we can take as little or as much code as we want and transform it as we go," he says. "And we don't remove the old code, just in case. We build new systems that can be easily documented."

Quipoz was founded in January 2002. Its customers include many of Australia's largest IT users, such as Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank. CSC is using Quipoz's software to move its Insure/90 legacy software system, used by many of Australia's leading insurers, to Microsoft's .Net platform.

Mr Tonkin says the next step may be to take Quipoz public. The novelty of its approach, and the success of its methods, attracts significant attention and business partners such as IBM, EDS and Fujitsu. Mr Tonkin says acquisition by one of the leading services company is possible, but not the ideal option: "If one of them owned us, the others would be reluctant to use the software."

Keep an eye on Quipoz. It just might be the next Australian software success story.

Perspectives Graeme Philipson The Age. © The Age. Reproduced by Permission.

Saving Legacy Systems with Automated Software Transformation

"We believe we are unique in the world in what we offer," Quipoz managing director Brian Lockyer told TechNewsWorld. "Yes, other organizations are performing the transformation of legacy applications, but to nowhere near the level of automation offered by Quipoz."

Read the full article at
http://technewsworld.com/perl/story/32846.html