WebFOCUS and EDA Copy Manager Enable Modern IT Architecture at Harris Corporation
Snapshot
| Organization Harris Corporation, a global supplier of products and services for wireless, broadcast, government, and network support in communications market. |
| The Challenge Evolve IT architecture for more rapid, less costly business management. |
| The Strategy Migrate all mainframe legacy data to a UNIX platform and enable real-time data access and reporting in a client/server and Web environment. |
| The Results Successful migration of numerous financial applications and data off the mainframe and initiation of Web-based reporting through a Managed Reporting Environment |
| Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, FOCUS, Copy Manager, Information Builders Consulting |
Back in early 1999, when Jorosylan Williams recieved news that Harris Corporation was moving off the mainframe, she was surprised. "We had been hearing rumors for years but nobody believed them," she explains. "All of a sudden, we were faced with an immense migration challenge."
As a software engineer in the Data Management Services Group at Harris, Williams says the migration mandate was a sweeping one. "The company wanted everything – all our legacy systems – ported to a UNIX system as rapidly as possible," she continues. "Our goal was to create a less costly, more flexible and more efficient way to access and report on legacy data via the Web. As part of that plan, we wanted to make data available to our users on a real-time basis using Information Builders' WebFOCUS."
Harris is an international company with communications products and services in the wireless, broadcast, government, and network support markets. With an aggressive concentration on the global communications market, the company operates in 90 countries, and employs more than 10,500 people. Revenues for fiscal 1999 were $1.7 billion.
Keeping up with its ambitious growth agenda meant modernizing the IT architecture. With a deadline for completing the migration – and with millions of lines of data to be extracted, transformed, and loaded onto the UNIX platform – Williams knew she needed help. She and her team began looking for a powerful, automated solution that could simplify the migration project. "We researched several tools for doing the migration, but ultimately we decided on EDA Copy Manager from Information Builders," she relates. "In addition to having the best migration technology, our selection was based on long familiarity with and confidence in Information Builders as a company. We are longtime users of FOCUS, and we knew the company had the highest quality products and services."
Migrating With Information Builders
Harris used EDA Copy Manager to extract data from legacy IDMS databases on an MVS mainframe, convert the data to the correct format, and port the legacy applications to a Sun Enterprise 450 server running the Sun Solaris operating system. "In our case, we didn't so much need the broad reach of EDA Copy Manager as we needed its power to accurately migrate massive amounts of data," Williams comments. "Information Builders was called in to do a proof-of-concept. The results were unanimous: everyone was very impressed with EDA Copy Manager's capabilities."
Information Builders Consulting was on site for about two weeks to assist with the critical first stage of the migration process. Its primary role was to check the data descriptions for accuracy – in particular, that the data being migrated to UNIX was in the correct format. Williams was also glad to have the consultants standing by to help her team resolve any issues that might arise. "Information Builders excelled at the thing we needed most – ensuring that we were migrating the data properly," she says. "They helped us get started on the right path, and although their job here has long since been completed, they still call me, just to see how everything is going. That kind of added concern really impresses me."
For Williams, the heavy-duty work of migration has been the pivotal factor in modernizing Harris' IT systems. Now that this task is nearing completion, she has a true appreciation for the capabilities of EDA Copy Manager. "One of the things we kept running into was that the legacy data sometimes did not match the metadata," she recalls. "That meant we would have to go out and modify the metadata to match the data. If we had done that manually, it would have been a nightmare. But EDA Copy Manager automatically flags places where the data doesn't match the metadata. I've copied hundreds of files without any major problems."
Leveraging the New Platform
After migrating the mainframe data to the UNIX platform, Information Builders' consultants showed Williams how the data would look in a report format. "We learned from this process that our users can create and modify reports very easily," she explains. "This was very important to us, because our ultimate goal was to inject the company with a higher level of business intelligence by empowering people with greater reporting capabilities."
It was precisely this desire for greater reporting and more robust business intelligence capabilities that led Harris to WebFOCUS. Numerous report prototypes have already been created in the financial and materials management areas of the company. And Williams expects to roll out a complete Managed Reporting Environment after completion of the migration effort. "We have hundreds of users anxiously awaiting WebFOCUS," she says. "Right now, it is being used by our developers, maybe 20 in all, but we'll be expanding that usage very fast."
WebFOCUS was installed on a UNIX server, where it can be accessed by standard Web browsers, eliminating the need to install desktop applications and application upgrades on thousands of individual desktop PCs. "We want one standard setup, so we don't have to do multiple installations and upgrades for all our various clients," Williams confirms. "People can simply use an Internet browser to get the reports they want, and there are no plug-ins required."
Fast Track to Success
Information Builders jump-started the Web reporting effort with a half-day, hands-on WebFOCUS workshop for Harris users. The main reason for the training was to demonstrate what the product is capable of doing. "We wanted to show users how easy it is to generate reports," says Williams. "It's certainly quite a contrast – all of a sudden, our users have data available in seconds, as opposed to the practice of having to submit batch jobs and wait for output the next business day." Harris had only key users involved in the workshop, who were then responsible for creating standard reports, or assisting their business units with developing reporting applications.
The migration process was completed on time and some WebFOCUS prototypes were created, such as Material Manufacturing reports. Harris has also used WebFOCUS to develop payroll reports, primarily for auditing purposes. Feedback from users has been spontaneous and enthusiastic. "In the past, developers wrote reports and delivered them to users," says Williams. "Now users can create their own reports to fit their needs. They're ecstatic – that's what happens when you give people control over their own business environment. I've been hearing comments like, 'Where has WebFOCUS been all my life?'"
Meeting the Deadline
Having migrated 20 to 30 gigabytes of data and hundreds of legacy applications to the UNIX environment, Williams feels there is no end to the advanced capabilities that can be deployed in the new client/server, Internet-enabled environment. She credits Information Builders for making the migration project a success. "I don't know how we would have completed such a large migration on time without EDA Copy Manager, and I don't know what our future would look like without the prospect of WebFOCUS," she sums up. "We needed one to be better able to do the other."
