Presidential Life recognized the benefit of moving off the mainframe in the mid-1990s and has been running production CICS-based applications that support annuity products, tax and stockholder systems on Windows NT for several years. The system that supports the life insurance operations is based on a third party product (LifePRO by PDMA) and was converted to NetCOBOL for Windows in 2003. Its data is stored in indexed files using Pervasive’s Btrieve product.

“Support for Windows NT ceases in January 2005 and support for the CICS-supporting package Presidential Life has been using expires in June 2005,” said Marilyn Shenn, senior vice president, CIO for Presidential Life. “Continuing to execute on these unsupported systems would clearly be unacceptable so we had to find a solution that would keep us fully supported for the foreseeable future.”

In addition to the critical support needs, Presidential Life was also beginning to consider taking advantage of some of the GUI features, or Web connectivity, available in newer releases of the Windows operating system and, if possible, find a more agreeable fee structure for its COBOL runtime support.

Resolving the support issues clearly required upgrading to the latest versions of Windows and finding a newer product that would support CICS COBOL programs. NeoKicks not only satisfies the CICS migration and support requirements, but it also works on Microsoft’s strategic .NET environment and also provides an upgrade path for BMS screens, taking them to ASP.NET pages.

The COBOL part of the solution, NetCOBOL for .NET, which provides the foundation for NeoKicks, gave access to the extensive .NET Framework class libraries andbrought the benefits of Visual Studio .NET to Presidential Life developers. It also has a no-runtime-charge model.

Using the Btrieve feature of Pervasive.SQL for the COBOL data file support for the migrating CICS code allows Presidential Life to bring all its data into a common file system because the Life Insurance systems already use Btrieve.

“One of the primary reasons Presidential Life chose Fujitsu Software was the ease of migration provided by the NeoKicks Project Wizard, which processes the COBOL programs and BMS maps into their new .NET form and populates Visual Studio .NET projects,” said Ron Langer, senior director, languages group, Fujitsu Software. “Other advantages became apparent during pilot programs, including better application performance and more competitive pricing of production support, such as no COBOL runtimes.”

Commenting on the choice of Fujitsu Software, Shenn said “Presidential Life already had experience with Fujitsu Software’s products when we migrated to NetCOBOL for Windows in 2003. This gave us confidence in the reliability of the products and, after researching other solutions available to support CICS in the Windows environment, we decided that NeoKicks with NetCOBOL was going to be the best solution to give us the agility we were seeking for the future, both in terms of application development options and a reasonable cost base.”