m2o Heals HBA Health Insurance with Business Application Migration

UNIX migration reduces costs, maintains application reliability and minimises impact on business allowing HBA to improve services to its members

Oxford, UK - February 23, 2006 - MOVE2OPEN (m2o), a leading provider of data migration and application conversion solutions, announces the successful business application migration of HBA Health Insurance. HBA Health Insurance has made annual savings of $2 million by migrating its business applications from an expensive mainframe system to a lower-cost UNIX platform using tools from leading legacy migration software provider, m2o.

Business Applications migration allows HBA to make annual savings of $2 million

"By migrating its legacy assets, HBA is now ready to take advantage of a modernised Web services infrastructure to improve customer service levels and further reduce IT costs," explain Huw Price, Managing Director of m2o. With more than a million members, HBA is one of Australia's major health insurers and part of worldwide health and care company, BUPA. When BUPA acquired HBA in 2003, it separated all key systems from its previous owner (AXA) to establish its own computer functions and IT services in Melbourne. The final transfer was the migration of BOSS - the core administration and service system of the business - from a mainframe located in New York to a UNIX Sun Solaris system in Australia.

UNIX migration reduces costs, maintains reliability and minimises impact on business

Time was a crucial consideration in the migration. "Many options were considered, including creating a like-for-like system in Australia, or using the BUPA parent system as a base for the new system," said Peter Powell, CIO, HBA Australia. "However, none of these options really matched our requirements or fitted into the time available."

After considering a number of different options, HBA chose i2c from m2o to automate the conversion of CA-IDEAL to Micro Focus Cobol and the migration of CA-DATACOM to Oracle. The migration had minimal impact to existing business processes and IS development staff and resulted in significant savings.

"The savings we're making by migrating our applications to UNIX are being re-invested to improve services to our members," said Powell. "It also gives us a modern platform and the means to establish further Web services down the track." The software and hardware migration was completed in 14 months and went live in January 2005. Powell estimates a Return on Investment of just under three years for the migration which saw the conversion of six million lines of code and tens of thousands of files .BUPA has also found the new UNIX-based system just as reliable as the old mainframe platform.

About Move2open

m2o is a leading provider of data migration and application conversion solutions that unlock the value of relational databases and legacy systems. m2o specializes in transforming legacy applications, including automated conversions from CA-IDEAL to open languages such as COBOL and Java and migrations from CA-Datacom to open databases such as CA-Ingres, Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server. m2o provides automated conversion tools and migration services that offer wide platform coverage, exceptional accuracy and clear Return on Investment that are unmatched by any other vendor or solution. m2o has over ten years experience with a worldwide customer base of blue-chip organizations that benefit from its unique expertise and automated tools.

Contact Details:

Nick Jones (Sales Director)

m2o Limited
The Oxford Centre for Innovation
Mill Street
Oxford, OX2 0JX