Luxembourg private bank Société Générale Bank & Trust has completed a two-year project to migrate its core banking system, comprising ten million lines of code, to a cloud computing architecture.
The core banking applications transferred were spread over 17000 programs and 6000 screens developed in Natural 4GL.
These applications used a significant amount of data that was managed on the mainframe in Adabas databases and Isam indexed files. The programs made extensive use of the transaction processing and batch environments of the mainframe with 12000 jobs and many proprietary utilities.
Luc Dosquet, deputy CIO at SGBT, who initiated and managed the project, says: "The mainframe applications fully addressed the needs of business for many years. The migration let us preserve the investment in the existing system, while adding value by moving it to a scalable, open environment."
The bank employed Blegium-based software house Anubex to aid in the preparation and testing of the applications as they were transitioned away from the mainframe to the cloud for access by a new system running Oracle RAC as the database, and Cobol application servers on a fully virtualised Linux platform provided by VCE.
The bank's developers are now using 'drag and drop' gestures to maintain the migrated code in a standard Eclipse IDE which the bank also hosts on a virtual desktop infrastructure.
Eric Mely, CTO at SGBT, comments: "The migration of our mainframe system gave us the opportunity to move these mission-critical applications to the bank's private cloud. Our private cloud has facilitated the delivery of different environments, and was able to allocate resources to virtual machines where needed, thanks to its flexibility."