TRSL
With $12.5 billion in assets, the Teachers’ Retirement System of Louisiana (TRSL) is the state’s largest public retirement system, providing services and benefits to more than 150,000 individuals. The organization’s mission is to safeguard and manage the money it holds in trust to provide retirement income for its members.
Challenge
TRSL had been relying on mission-critical applications written in the Speedware/4GL, Visual Speedware and Speedware Autobahn II languages since the early 1990s. The organization was very pleased with the performance of these applications, as they had been perfectly customized for their specific requirements.
When HP announced that it would no longer support the popular HP e3000 platform, TRSL knew that migration was the way to go. In fact, its business applications had been so tailored over the years that no packaged application available on the market would suit its needs.
Solution
The organization solicited a number of proposals for migration projects – and Fresche quickly made the short list. Not only does Fresche understand its own technology better than anyone else, but its reputation and experience in the migration space are unparalleled. In addition, Fresche’s overall solution price was much more competitive than what other vendors had proposed … but that was simply icing on the cake!
Knowing it would be in good hands, TRSL retained Fresche’s services to perform a complete system migration. Cross-platform portable Speedware V7, Visual Speedware and Speedware Autobahn II applications were migrated to HP-UX, and the TurboIMAGE and KSAM databases were converted to Oracle.
To help TRSL’s internal IT staff become self-sufficient, the consultants at Fresche created a customized training plan around their needs. Within nine months, the challenging project was complete. The entire environment, consisting of 18 mission-critical applications was migrated to HP-UX and 11 databases were migrated to Oracle.
The team at TRSL had expected to implement the new system over the course of one long weekend, given that the nature of the applications precluded prolonged system downtime. Much to the staff’s surprise, the new system was “cut-over” by midday on Saturday! The transition was therefore seamless to the system’s 250+ users.
TRSL credits its strong relationships with Hewlett- Packard and Fresche, as well as the very strong commitment of its own internal staff, with the tremendous success of this project.
Results
Years of investment were protected: TRSL had worked very hard over the past 15 years to develop mission-critical applications geared specifically to their particular needs. Fresche’s migration solution allowed the organization to protect its legacy applications while moving toward a more modern computing platform and database management system.
Rapid project execution and implementation time: Within only nine months, all of TRSL’s applications and database systems were migrated to HP-UX and Oracle. In addition, to minimize system downtime, the whole system was implemented and went “live” within a single weekend.
A rapid and cost-effective solution: Not only was Fresche’s migration solution much less expensive than its competitors’, but the project was actually completed well under budget! As well, by capitalizing on the existing strengths of TRSL’s IT staff and building a solution around their skills, the organization ensures self-sufficiency and minimizes dependency on outside vendors.
