When IT experts talk about migration, they don’t mean the movement of populations; rather, the translation and conversion of obsolete programs, files and databases into modern software architectures, for example web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA). Pro et con, based at the Technologie Centrum Chemnitz, has now completed an almost unique software project in terms of its complexity, in collaboration with Amadeus Germany, Germany’s leading operator of travel sales systems.
The scale of the project becomes clear when you realise that in Germany alone, 85% of all travel agents work with the Amadeus system on around 45,000 PCs. This system is used by 500 airline companies, over 75,000 hotels, 22 car rental businesses and around 200 travel and bus companies to take and manage their bookings via the global computer system provided by Amadeus. Add to that 74 transport networks, 40 European rail networks, 30 ferry services, six insurance providers and several event-ticket seller systems. At peak times, Amadeus performs more than 500 user transactions in parallel per second.
In the past, the rapidly growing market placed ever increasing demands on the program systems and the associated hardware, which was developed over decades. For this reason, Amadeus launched the "ARNO" project (Application Relocation to New Operating System) three years ago. The aim was to save the company know-how that was fused within the programs, since this represented a unique selling point against the competition. However, the software and hardware would also be transferred over to a modern IT architecture in order to be able to meet the growing demand on software and hardware capacity over years to come and at a reasonable cost.
It is not possible to “manually" translate tens of thousands of programs and files with several million program lines, such a feat would require sophisticated scientific methods and software tools.
Therefore, Amadeus chose the leading technology company in software migration, pro et con, as its project partner. The business, which was launched 14 years ago as a spin-off of the Chemnitz University of Technology, has already successfully completed a number of migration projects for well-known clients, including MAN and Cosmos Versicherung (insurance).
“The scientific basis of our company is built partly on results that were obtained during our research work at the Chemnitz University of Technology in the field of programming languages and compilers”, observes Dr. Uwe Kaiser, one of the two managing directors of the firm. Werner Teppe, Senior Project Manager for Development at Amadeus Germany, adds: “The conversion tools from pro et con satisfy the current top scientific level, enabling seamless conversion with a high degree of automation and were therefore a fundamental prerequisite for the success of the project over the planned period and within the specified budget. Over the course of the project, which ran for several years, it was essential that day to day operations could continue without interruption.
It was also necessary to release new program versions every month in order to meet current customer demands. As project partners, pro et con and Amadeus mastered these logistic challenges bravely”.
On 30th April, Amadeus switched off its last old computer. The new systems have been running since then, seven days a week, around the clock, and the target of 500 transactions per second is already being exceeded. This is another successful migration project that pro et con can add to their list. The business currently employs 13 members of staff, five of whom are graduates of Chemnitz University.
The company works closely with the IT faculty at the Chemnitz University of Technology in the research field, in particular with the professorship of Information Systems and Software Technology.
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