Escaping the Mainframe

Tulane University to evade quarter million in annual maintenance fees by migrating its systems away from a mainframe; COBOL on a microcomputer saves the day.

by Demir Barlas, Line56

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Tulane University, like many other institutes of higher education across the country, has had to more with less for some years now. That's why the $250,000 in maintenance fees that the university pays for its Ideal/Datacom mainframe from vendor Computer Associates (CA) troubled the university's new CIO, Dr. John Lawson, when he came aboard a few years ago.

"I suspect we've had the mainframe for many years," says Lawson. "In terms of MIPS [millions of instruction per second], we got it up to 219." Tulane's maintenance deal with CA is tied to processors, and the number of MIPS -- "not huge, but reasonably large for us," according to Lawson -- resulted in heavy fees.
 
Tulane began looking for ways out. In so doing, it came across migration specialist Move2Open. "M2O suggested that we move to Micro Focus COBOL, a microcomputer," Lawson recalls, saying that Tulane had previously tried to get the budget development system running on COBOL (rather than Ideal/Datacom) on the mainframe itself. The Move2Open suggestion, though, pointed to the possibility of doing away with the mainframe together, an exciting prospect.
 
The migration away from the mainframe began with the Oracle financials system. There remained the systems for student information, budget development, and HR.
 
Tulane began with the budget development system, which is used by departments across the university. "The project was three to four months long," says Lawson. Given that the university invested eight months in the "false start" of COBOL in the mainframe, it was a rapid timeframe.
 
When the project was over, Tulane was using fewer processors under its maintenance agreement, meaning "we're paying a lot less," according to Lawson. He predicts that, thanks to Move2Open and Micro Focus, the HR system will be off the mainframe in the next year while the migration of the student information system will require about eighteen months. By that time, the maintenance agreement that once stood at $250,000 a year will be gone, along with the mainframe.

The original article is available at: Line56 "Escaping the Mainframe"