ASNA Success Stories
Extending and enhancing the IBM i and Microsoft platforms since 1982
Personal and Commercial Insurance
Region
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and beyond
Project type
IBM i RPG migration to ASNA Visual RPG (the precursor to ASNA Encore RPG)
Lines of code migrated
2.5m
Database
IBM i DB2
Products
ASNA Monarch, Visual RPG
Customer Profile
A large insurance company that primarily serves Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The company provides a fully-integrated insurance software system for both personal and commercial insurance.
Business Challenge
For many years, the company sold its RPG, character-based IBM i application. However, as the graphical user interface started making inroads into enterprise software, it became more challenging to acquire new customers with what was perceived as an old-fashioned software product. Never mind that this “old-fashioned” software product was highly reliable and offered a resolution for virtually any insurance company challenge, the stigma of the green-screen was challenging to overcome.
Options Considered
To resolve its user interface issues, the company first used IBM’s WebFacing product. It was quiclky learned that screen-scraping is just too limited in its ability to the quality UI needed.
Why ASNA?
Upon a recommendation from an Icelandic ASNA customer, the company investigated how ASNA could help. A Monarch proof-of-concent was created with ASNA’s European Services Team. It was a big success and the company quickly committed to using ASNA Monarch to mgration their application to . NET.
Implementation
Vitec Nice migrated the Norwegian version of their application, with a team of 10-11 developers focusing on the Monarch project. The migration targeted ASNA Visual RPG (the precursor to ASNA Encore RPG) and the database was left on the IBM i. All of interactive programs and 70% of batch programs were migrated. Vitec Nice performed the migration largely independently, relying on their skilled team and ASNA’s responsive tech support for challenges.
This Monarch migration included about 2500 programs that comprised about 2.5m lines of code (including CL, RPG/400 and ILE RPG). Because the three primary regions that the company serves (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) all have different regulatory compliance schemes, there are essentially three versions of the application—all of which were migrated successfully.
Business Benefit
The company is very happy with the results of their ASNA Monarch migration. Users are delighed with it—especially appreciating its modern, browser-based user interface. Using ASNA Monarch led to improved business agility, increased productivity, and lowered costs. The company says it couldn’t have rewritten its applications by hand in the time it took to migrate the existing application to .NET with Monarch.