CASE STUDY
American diversified insurer adopts CAST for discovery of mainframe ecosystem accelerating modernization program – 4x faster & accurate
Client is a leading global insurance company, recognized as one of the top insurers in the world, providing a wide range of products and services to individuals and businesses.
CAST Imaging enabled the LoB IT team to understand the complexities they will have to deal with prior to starting the modernization work without disturbing the subject-matter experts.
CAST provides the understanding that we simply don’t have, without disturbing subject matter experts.
Senior Enterprise Architect
Four
weeks
to understand the core services of 10s of millions lines of mainframe and distributed applications
Less
reliance
on SMEs - a scarce IT resource
Challenge
Five years ago, this multi-billion-dollar American insurance company signed a major deal with a leading cloud provider.
While they successfully migrated 73% of their applications to the cloud, the majority remain intricately linked to a large and complex mainframe system housed in on-premises data centers
Despite six failed attempts with various service providers to understand and plan the mainframe decommissioning, the group CIO had to accept significant price increases at contract renewal from the mainframe OS and tools providers.
Solution
The group CIO met with CAST during an MIT event as he was embarking on their seventh attempt to document tprior to their migration off the mainframe – the intricacies of 110M lines of COBOL applications using DB2 and IMS database systems.
The IT department decided to compare the precision, accuracy, and speed of discovering and documenting several mainframe and distributed applications. This comparison was between the chosen service provider using a proprietary tool and lots of person-hours, and the automated output of CAST Imaging, the most advanced MRI for custom-built software.
Results
In just four weeks, CAST Imaging, operated by the CAST professional services team, delivered documentation that the IT department of the US insurance company found both impressive and accurate.
The interactive visualization of the applications’ inner workings made it very easy and fast for the LoB IT team to understand the complexities they will have to deal with prior to starting the modernization work.
Unlike the manual approach of the service provider, CAST Imaging did not require extensive interviews with customers’ subject-matter experts, which significantly disrupt the development team's focus.
