Natural Migration and Legacy Modernization

What Our Clients Say

Shmuel Flink, General Manager for NPA Computers
"BluePhoenix made it so much easier for us to achieve this critical business goal. It was a pleasure to work with their team of migration experts who successfully finished the project on time."

Ole Blöndal, CEO of Danish Commerce and Companies Agency
"Not only will the migration allow us to move our technology forward, but thanks to the efficiency of the automated conversion tools, we estimate significant savings in annual operating costs and expect to achieve a very rapid return on our investment. BluePhoenix was the only company in the field that could offer us a fully automated conversion solution from ADABAS/Natural."

Bill Underwood, CIO and Director of Office of Information Technology, Department of Energy / Energy Information Administration
"We look forward to leveraging the benefits of modern technology with the reduced risk and timeframes that BluePhoenix can provide."

Aric Agamy, VP development and infrastructure, Israel Local Authorities Data Processing Center.
“The excellent cooperation between the two companies enabled us to complete the project quickly and efficiently, and today we can provide a comprehensive solution to our large customer base—the local authorities and the citizens relying on them. Furthermore, closing the mainframe leads to tremendous saving in our TCO. These savings in the current economic climate are savings that are appreciated by our customers. This project demonstrates the importance of technology that enables leveraging past investments, and the economical importance of modernization.”

Natural Migration and Modernization

Many organizations are still running large Natural applications that were developed more than 30 years ago. The high maintenance costs and lack of Natural developers is causing companies to look at Natural migration routes to more modern technologies.

Automated Natural Migration Without Functional Change

BluePhoenix’s Natural migration solution enables an automated migration of Natural applications to COBOL, Natural to Java, or Natural to C#. The Natural migration, or Natural modernization can be accompanied by an ADABAS migration to modern relational databases (such as ADABAS to DB2, ADABAS to Oracle, or ADABAS to SQL-Server).

Our Natural modernization solution provides an automated Natural migration to more modern architectures without functional change. Generated screens and windows use modern technology, while keeping the same look and feel (if required), which accelerates the users’ acceptance of the new application.

A complete solution is provided for migrating Natural applications, data models, and data. The end result is easy to maintain, well documented, and exists in a modern, lower-cost environment.

Business Benefits

Dramatically reduces license and maintenance costs
Provides Web-based application look and feel (shorter users’ learning curve)
Makes application enhancement easier
Provides cost effective migration
Eliminates the IT resources challenge
Uses proven automated tools, thereby mitigating many of the project risks

Technical Benefits

Supports data access to ADABAS, VSAM, IMS, DB2, SQL Server, or Oracle
Handles all aspects of the Natural syntax including specific constructs such as REINPUT statements
Handles all Natural objects including programs, subprograms, DDMs, maps, and data area types
Supports both reporting and structured mode Natural
Can be combined with the migration of COBOL to a relational database
Multi-tier J2EE architectures with HTML/JSP client, Java core, and JDBC data access
Highly maintainable—can be more easily enhanced in the new environments
Allows customer-specific Natural migration options such as naming convention changes
Support for JCL migration for a mainframe destination, or JCL to script for a Unix or Windows destination