Sun takes aim at mainframe users

By Deni Connor, Network World
November 11, 2002 12:05 AM ET

. What's this?

Sun is luring mainframe customers away from IBM with expanded software and services that the company says let them rehost COBOL and Customer Information Control System applications on less-expensive Sun servers.

The company announced professional services and two software packages - Sun Mainframe Transaction Processing Software 8.0 (SunMTP) and Sun Mainframe Batch Manager Software 10.0 (SunMBM) - that let customers migrate their legacy CICS, COBOL and batch applications to Sun's powerful Sun Fire 12000 or 15000 servers.

SunMTP lets customers reuse transaction-processing applications written in COBOL or PL/1. It includes a VSAM indexed sequential file system and interfaces to DB2 or Oracle databases. SunMBM is a batch job execution system that supports Job Control Language translation and coexisting with Java technology. With SunMTP and SunMBM, applications will require recompiling, but are not run as emulation tasks, thus speeding application performance.

Analysts say that as fewer new applications are being written for mainframes and as fewer experienced mainframe programmers are available, Sun's Mainframe Rehosting Software is attractive.

Related Content

"Sun is looking at IT shops that are faced with a decision of staffing, support and application availability as customers for its rehosting products," says Vernon Turner, research director at IDC. "There has been almost 40 years of mainframe application development, and some of those applications are clearly still useful. There's a lot of CICS, for example, still hanging around."

One large insurance company has seen the positive effects of migrating its mainframe applications to Sun Fire servers running Solaris.

Transamerica Life of Canada faced having to migrate a mainframe-based application and data to a Sun platform when it acquired NN Life Insurance Company of Canada.

Click to see: Big Code

"We looked at the cost of ownership issues in keeping the mainframe going [forward] and found that the outsourcing [arrangement] was something we didn't have to afford on an ongoing basis," says Naj Hirani, CIO for Transamerica.

"Our vision was to integrate application systems and consolidate technology platforms to achieve cost-effectiveness, as well as better align application systems to support the Life and Investment products' back-office operations," Hirani says.

"Regardless which of the available alternatives was chosen - either outsourcing to another vendor or acquiring and implementing a mainframe platform in-house or rehosting the application on to another platform; together with reducing costs - it had to be seamless to the business users [meaning no change to the system and features], " he says.

Hirani signed up with Sun for its mainframe rehosting products to assist in the migration of the mainframe applications and data.

"When we compared our systems operation costs of the mainframe vs. hosting the applications on the Sun platform, we achieved upwards of a 50% cost savings."

Sun has added authentication-based security to the products and the ability to cluster servers with Sun Cluster server clustering software. Further, it has increased the interoperability between Enterprise Java Beans-enabled and legacy applications. The software now can be managed from any point on the network.