About the client
The National Railroad Operator (Agency) is the largest national passenger railroad organization in North America with the highest number of route miles serving several passengers every year.
Situation
The agency hosted several custom applications on a zOS mainframe based legacy system with a 20+ year old code base. Attrition of SMEs running and maintaining these applications, limited knowledge and documentation of these applications, and proportionally higher operational cost created significant risks to business continuity and limited the agency’s ability to meet its mission and serve customers cost effectively.
Key Challenges
- The agency had struggled with its modernization initiatives over the years as it executed an opportunistic approach to modernization lacking in overall vision, integrated planning and organization-wide coordination.
- These past initiatives generally involved either a “rewrite from scratch” or a “rip and replace” with COTS solution options. Both approaches proved to be cost prohibitive, time consuming, and highly disruptive to business operations.
- Furthermore, these mainframe applications had unique and complex business functionality which had evolved over decades, making them poor candidates for these options as the effort to replicate existing functionality in the new solutions was significant.
The Solution
Zero disruption modernization of mainframe system, reducing TCO by nearly 30%
Infosys Public Services (IPS) had been maintaining the agency’s systems in a managed services model and had developed a good understanding of the application portfolio.
Building upon this insight, IPS conducted a strategic assessment of the agency’s modernization priorities, organizational capabilities, and current legacy footprint to develop a data-driven blueprint and modernization roadmap for re-engineering their mainframe applications and migrating them to the cloud.
The re-engineering approach extends the value of legacy applications by preserving the rich business logic buried in these systems from the tangled mess in which it is caught – transforming them into renewed applications running on modern architectures and technology platforms.
We followed a hybrid (SDLC + Agile) software development methodology and leveraged 3rd party and in-house tools to help automate the conversion and migration of over four(4) million Lines of Code (LoC) and the underlying legacy databases to the AWS cloud in multiple iterations spanning an 18-month window.
The application sub-portfolio-based sprints enabled us to demonstrate incremental progress and faster realization of business benefits.
Benefits
~30% lower infrastructure and operational support cost
~20% faster time to market for new features and capabilities
No change in business logic to minimize training investments and faster user adoption
Improved system performance and reduced operational risk
Funding transformation through cost savings realized from migration off the high-cost zOS mainframe platform to the AWS cloud
Request for services
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