CASE STUDY: Web Enablement
The Business Problem:
A Tier 1 Wireless Carrier wanted to extend the life/use of their mainframe (CICS/DB2) customer care and billing system for web GUI and web services capabilities. This system had been in place for 12 years and had received numerous enhancements and modifications. Consequently, simply replacing this system that serviced almost 20 million customers was not an option. This was a complex undertaking since the customer wanted to maintain transaction integrity as it stood in its native form. ECS was asked to deliver web enablement and a web GUI with minimal impact to the existing legacy system while leveraging existing assets.
The Approach:
ECS provided and managed a senior team of developers to create transactional infrastructure to allow for existing system functionality while creating an Externally Callable Interface (ECI) enabled legacy system. This system was used to feed a Web GUI and XML based transaction gateway to the mainframe for other internal and external applications. ECS provided Project Management, Technical Architecture, Software Development as well as Integration and Performance Testing. The core XML based gateway remains in place 6 years later. This total production capability was delivered in less than 6 months.
The Solution:
The solution included a java infrastructure based on IBM's WebSphere and the CICS transaction gateway. Through the development of custom COBOL copybook parsing programs ECS generated XML metadata files describing the CICS communication area (commarea) layout. Using a Java framework ECS developed to process the CICS transaction metadata file, developers were able to easily invoke existing COBOL programs enabling reuse of existing business logic. In addition to the work that ECS performed on the legacy integration, ECS was also responsible for developing the HTML front-end.
THE RESULTS:
The initial infrastructure continues to perform well today and supports 30 external projects.
As a result, ECS has been performing other web services and mainframe development for the past
3 years and maintains a preferred vendor status with the customer.
ECS provides resources for Project Management, Business Analysis, Technical Architecture, and Software Development.
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