Consumer Goods Company Modernizes With AWS Mainframe Migration
This consumer goods producer set a goal to optimize its IT environment and enable new digital initiatives.
The company deployed the NTT DATA mainframe modernization team to help it eliminate its reliance on legacy infrastructure in its physical data centers, shifting all its business applications to AWS. Once migrated, the NTT DATA team introduced DevOps tools and processes to improve efficiency, optimize cost and speed time to market.
Business Needs
Selling household name products to customers for decades, this leading consumer goods company has operated on mainframe systems since the mid-1960s. Although some of its applications had resided on mainframe systems for over 50 years, the decision was made at the business level to close the company’s data center and move its systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to optimize costs and grow agility.
While the organization had migrated roughly 80% of its data center, it was blocked from completing the migration by its mainframe systems. With mission-critical workloads that processed more than $8 billion in revenue per year, the company needed expert help to migrate from its on-premises mainframe systems to AWS. Impressed by NTT DATA’s application migration and modernization solutions, track record of success and its least-risk approach, the NTT DATA team was selected to lead the modernization project.
Outcomes
- Reduces operational support costs 25%
- Reduces ongoing infrastructure costs 65%
- Exits data center early, saving millions
- Accelerates new feature releases
- Reduces manual deployment activity by 80%
- Decreases deployment defects by 100%
Solution
The mainframe migration approach
Using NTT DATA’s proprietary mainframe re-hosting solution, UniKix, the NTT DATA team effectively migrated 25 IBM mainframe applications, including mission-critical systems responsible for corporate billing and reimbursement. NTT DATA provided a single vendor solution for re-hosting technology, application and data migration services, testing, production cutover and on-going product support. This single vendor approach combined with our strategies to mitigate unseen risks resulted in a low-risk migration effort.
The NTT DATA team followed a comprehensive modernization process, performing a thorough discovery process to understand the environment and designed the target environment and migration plan. The team concluded with the migration implementation including performing test and deployment. The re-hosted workloads included:
- CICS and Batch/JCL environments
- COBOL, CA Ideal, PL/1, and Datacom applications
- VSAM, Sequential, GDGs, DB2, IMS DB and Datacom DB
Not only did the team successfully complete the project but they did so while condensing the timeline by two months. The accelerated schedule allowed the organization to turn off their mainframe and move out of the datacenter ahead of time, resulting in millions in additional cost savings in facilities, licensing and other mainframe-related expenses.
DevOps grows developer agility
While the immediate goal was to ensure a smooth transition to the new environment, the joint NTT DATA and customer team soon transitioned to focus on adopting DevOps best practices for ongoing process improvement.
Introducing AWS-powered DevOps tools and processes has enabled the organization to speed up its release frequency by an order of magnitude. For example, mainframe releases that were run daily can now be run hourly and releases that ran weekly now run daily. The ability to build and deploy faster allows developers to meet the quickly changing needs of its customers and distributors with greater agility, extending its market leadership position.
With the support of our solution and AWS framework, the company has been able to rapidly modernize its solutions and increase its market responsiveness. For example, prior to engaging with NTT DATA, the organization lacked a way to migrate code between regions. Now it has an automated continuous deployment solution that minimizes manual effort, allowing developers to focus on more strategic, business-impacting work. In addition, the organization is expanding its digital innovation to create a real-time lens for distributors into customer data. Greater customer insight is just one way this consumer goods organization has become more responsive to the needs of its customers with NTT DATA’s guidance.
Business outcomes
Today, all this company’s enterprise applications run smoothly in AWS, powered in part by NTT DATA's re-hosting software. In addition to saving millions on its facilities, licensing and mainframe hardware, the organization was able to achieve a 25% reduction in operational support costs. And it saw a 65% reduction in ongoing infrastructure costs; by moving to AWS, the company now only pays for the compute resources it uses, rather than planning – and paying – for peak utilization. The company achieved ROI in just over a year. More importantly, it now has a platform that is positioned for future extensibility at greatly reduced cost, enabling it to innovate at the speed of the market.
About Consumer Goods Company
Leading supplier of consumer goods migrates mainframe workloads to AWS, adopts DevOps processes that reduce manual deployment activity by 80% and deployment defects by 100%.