NSC Group: Quality Services & Software Solutions Since 1970

The Plan

In September 2006, Legacy Software Downsizing were asked by HMRC whether we could migrate the VAT Office in Southend from Fujitsu VME equipment to a modern Sun Oracle platform. The plan was to begin the project in December 2006 and complete the full migration of all the Southend VAT and Customs and Excise processing by December 2007.

The Project

The Project commenced with the first meeting in Southend in December 2006. It was agreed that we would receive the whole of the source code of the VAT and non-VAT systems, which we then processed to arrive at an acceptable indicative cost for the migration of these systems to Sun Solaris Oracle.

A two year investigation had already established our capability, but as we were new to the people at the VAT Southend office it was agreed that we should migrate the Annual Arrears Review Sub System - AARSS - as a Proof of Concept.

Work started Jan 5th 2007 on upgrading our migration tool Powerdrive, which was originally developed in 1995. Whilst it was capable of migrating AARSS, it needed to be updated for the main migration. This involved upgrading Micro Focus COBOL from 32-bit to 64-bit, translating SCL to Java instead of Visual Basic or Korn shell and replacing original internal Informix database with Oracle 10g.

By the time the Purchase Order was received on March 2nd much of this work had already been done, but it was not until we received the 64-bit version of Micro Focus COBOL on March 15th that we could test the migrated application. Initial communication problems between the new COBOL and Java were successfully resolved, and AARSS was fully tested and working under Sun Oracle by April 27th.

Although we had asked that the Sun server at Southend - to which we were to deliver the migrated AARSS system - had Oracle 10 set up on it, when we arrived on May 1st we found that this had not been done so the visit was cut short. Oracle was finally available by June 4th and the migrated system was formally accepted on June 8th.

Phase Two

We had also been asked to do a "Phase 2" - the migration of VAT Accounts System - and we performed most of the work on this project. However it was never completed or delivered as the decision was taken that the Proof of Concept already delivered had demonstrated our capabilities. A business case was then put to the HMRC Board for the full migration to go ahead.

The LSD Migration Philosophy

This method of migration is ideal for large government organisations since it is transparent to the users. There is no disruption of the day to day work of government.

There is no requirement to freeze development, so legislative changes can proceed as normal. The internal middleware is modernised so that full advantage can be taken of the latest technologies - RDBMS, Web Enablement and SOA.

The lower running costs of modern platforms result in considerable savings, but the largest benefit comes in the post migration development environment where the latest IT technologies can be employed. As a result the costs of supporting the systems are considerably reduced.