Build once, deploy anywhere — including mainframes.
In addition to Ab Initio technology running in the cloud, on premises, and on Unix, Linux, and Windows, it also runs natively on mainframes. You can locate your computing where it makes the most sense and process data from practically anywhere (unlike open source libraries). This includes mission critical data stored in systems such as DB2, VSAM, IMS, ADABAS, MQ, CICS, COBOL copybooks, repeating groups, type 88, packed decimal, and EBCDIC.
Not only does Ab Initio technology run on all these platforms, applications built on top of Ab Initio can easily be redistributed across platforms, generally speaking with no changes. This allows users to choose the platform that is most appropriate for each piece of an application system. For example, users may do transaction processing on their mainframes, while transmitting transactions in real time to the cloud for analytics.
Migrating decades of development from on premises to the cloud could involve years of work. Or it could be done with Ab Initio.
A major US credit card provider built one of the world’s most innovative Business Intelligence environments using Ab Initio software. After decades of on-premises software development and operations, they decided to take advantage of new technologies, eliminate local data centers, and move to the cloud.
Moving a system that had been developed over a span of 20 years is not an easy prospect. The data was stored in a very large, expensive data warehouse. There were over 100,000 lines of SQL, including vendor-specific SQL. There were thousands of Ab Initio graphs. They did not have detailed information on exactly which graphs were running, how often they ran, and which parameters they ran with. That information was buried in the job scheduling system and in the shell scripts that launched the jobs, and it needed to be unearthed before proceeding with the migration.
Because automation was the key to this migration effort, they worked with Ab Initio to build the automation machinery. In some cases, Ab Initio provided out-of-the-box automation tools and translators. In other cases, the two teams worked together to build custom automation tools. Automated translation of Ab Initio–based application logic is possible because of Ab Initio’s unique structure and metadata-driven processing model. Ab Initio’s analysis tools automatically documented the various job and data dependencies. Ab Initio–developed tools also analyzed hundreds of thousands of runtime log files.
This migration took 18 months, a remarkably short time for a project of this magnitude. Working with Ab Initio, the credit card provider ended up with a more resilient system capable of taking advantage of the latest technologies, and they saved millions of dollars.