ID Innovative Datenverarbeitung GmbH

ID Innovative Datenverarbeitung, with its headquarters in Kevelaer/Germany, and approx. 60 employees, offers a full range of core business solutions for the insurance industry. ID's solutions address all aspects of the business, including financial, accounting and statistical. The functionality addresses the needs of both private customers and corporate clients within a single system. The base product aiDa/Backoffice has been installed more than 30 times on AS/400 server systems at well-known insurance companies all over Europe.

ID was motivated to migrate the functionally rich AS/400 aiDa software to UNIX to meet the objectives of a large insurance company that had a long-term strategy for UNIX. Since ID itself had no internal resources, they began to look for a qualified partner for this purpose. In this respect, only PKS with its impressive track record of migration, proved capable of migrating large challenging AS/400 applications in order to use them productively in complex end-user installations.

ID first set up a UNIX environment. The core application was then migrated with the Migration Tools 400 without any prior prototyping and analysis. This approach worked initially, but refinements were necessary in order to optimize the application for the UNIX platform. The developers at ID quickly adopted the Migration Tools 400 and, with the help of PKS, had the first test installation at the customer's site within six months.

In a second step ID planned to migrate their software to Windows NT as many of their prospects either didn't have an AS/400 or didn't want to buy one. ID realized that a large segment of the market was not being addressed by them, simply because they had been limited to the AS/400 platform. By eliminating the platform in the decision-making process, ID was confident that its business functionality would compete very effectively.

The first NT installation at a customer's site was possible in a very short time frame as a result of experience gained with the Migration Tools 400 already. Differences between data and data-related logic between the AS/400 and Windows were addressed during the initial test installation by both ID and PKS working in cooperation. At this point the aiDa basic software for NT can be installed in one day and be validated within one week.

According to Mr. Wolf, technical project manager of ID: "The entire system of software, the Migration Tools and hardware is stable and reliable. The system runs perfectly and the quality assurance of PKS is very good." Performance on other platforms also proved to be comparable to that experienced on the AS/400 as a result of the comprehensive performance analysis and tuning tools built into the Migration Tools. As Wolf says: "With the help of the Migration Tools a comparable performance with the AS/400 is achieved very easily."

There have been many positive benefits from migration, above and beyond simply having the application run on another platform. For example, users can easily connect remotely because the transfer of data between client and server is very efficient.

Since both ID and its customers use the Oracle database, there are many third party applications available which can transparently share the same data. This obviously leads to better business solutions, and a more secure and productive environment for the customer. Now open source tools and applications can easily be integrated with the core back-office application to extend the overall solution in a very efficient manner.

As Mr. Wolf puts it - "The integration of external applications is absolutely no problem - wonderful!"

ID plans to continue developing on the AS/400. The process of migration from the AS/400 has been so well automated now that new releases and applications can be made available on Windows and UNIX servers at the same time as on the AS/400.

According to Wolf again: "Many small and large customers work on the AS/400 and ID will continue developing on this system. But ID will also deliver its business solutions on the platforms that best suit its customers - it does not matter if that is an AS/400 or iSeries server, a Windows server or a UNIX server. This flexibility is the real benefit the Migration Tools have brought to us."