Transoft steered London's busses away from the 3000

November 2004

Transoft steered London’s busses away from the 3000

Migration specialist Transoft announced that it worked with CAP Gemini to transition the London bus company Arriva London from its HP 3000s to an Intel-based IBM server running Windows Server 2003. Arriva had COBOL-based bus management systems and relied on Transoft’s Legacy Liberator software to speed its migration away from the platform.

“We’ve saved time and potentially money on this migration,” Arriva’s finance director Alan Sewell said in a Transoft press release. “If we’d not have been able to migrate this solution from the old HP system, we could have needed additional people at each depot just to carry out day to day operational functions.” Sewell said that Arriva probably would have incurred penalties from not running the contracted service due to incorrect staff allocation. “We’ve got a much better system, making it much easier to interrogate data for reporting in the future,” Sewell added.

Transoft converted the HP COBOL-II code on the 3000s to ANSI-standard open systems ACUCOBOL. It used Transoft Adapter software to replace the existing legacy application VPlus screens while keeping the same look and feel for the garages. The migration also additionally offers a new improved graphical user interface in ASP.NET for management use.

Transoft’s Transoft Adapter software was also used to replace the IMAGE databases with the SQL Server 2000 database. The migrated system was installed on an IBM xSeries model 255 server. Arriva was motivated to migrate by HP’s withdrawal from the 3000 market.

“The HP e3000 will cease to be supported by HP from 2006,” said Alan Ricot, IT manager at Arriva London. “Migration has reduced not only the cost of ongoing maintenance of the legacy system, but also the business risk of being reliant on a platform nearing end-of-life.”