The Challenge
Global insurance carrier with operations in more than 50 countries needed to adapt as part of the greater transformation underway in the business and the industry. The transition required the supporting systems of the enterprise to be more malleable to the technologies, business rules, and products that were part of the strategy. The platform was written in the legacy software language Centura-Gupta, using the SQLBase/SQLWindows platform, dating back to the mid- to late- 1990’s.
Given the nature of the platform, it was challenging to find developers to support the legacy platform and non-standard language, making the system expensive to support. Being a client-server based application it was costly to support the remote terminal services capabilities for the nearly 10,000 users of the system.
The insurer asked that given the greater transformation underway that the application modernization process would not alter the user interface, including the look and feel of the application. Given the transformation underway, which included implementing new lines of business and products, there were additional requirements for no downtime or interruption to the business processes underway.
Insurer compared a Commerical off the Shelf (COTS) replacement strategy against a tool based application modernization approach, ultimately selecting a tool and automation-based modernization.
Timeline
COTS replacement was estimated to take 2 – 3 years before the first usable product would be available.
Tool based modernization took 14 months for production; the schedule was at the request of the insurer and allowed for new product implementation and offshore partner training with the modernized application before go-live.
Intangible Benefits
Removed 1.5 million lines of dead and unusable code.
Created tens of thousands of tests to speed future application changes.
Modern architecture and technologies mean rapid application changes and tooling support.
Did not waste years recreating business processes, systems, and data.
Before
Approximately 5.5 million lines of Centura-Gupta SQLWindows code
SQL Server (constrained version)
Client-server deployment model
100% manual testing
After
Approximately 3 million lines of .NET and Javascript code
SQL Server (latest)
Web-based deployment model, supported by DevOps tooling
Tens of thousands of automated tests
