Micro Focus puts Australian Stud Book online

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 21 September 2005 10:00

IT Industry - Deals

The Australian Stud Book (ASB), the body responsible for ensuring the integrity of thoroughbred breeding in Australia, claims to have saved more than $200,000 on IT costs and vastly improved online access to its records database since migrating from a mainframe system to Microsoft Windows. 

Jointly owned by the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) and the Victoria Racing Club (VRC), ASB's migration project was undertaken using a solution from legacy systems deployment consultant, Micro Focus. AJC is responsible for the IT systems supporting the Stud Book.
 
'Since 1989 our records have been stored on an ICL mainframe, which, although reliable, was extremely cumbersome when it came to updating our records or adding new features,' said AJC IT manager Eric Richardson. 
 
'We enjoyed a smooth transition to the new platform,' Richardson said. 'Our legacy COBOL applications translated perfectly and transferred intact to the desktop. In fact we had planned to phase out COBOL entirely once the application was up and running on the new platform, but when the migration was complete the converted COBOL applications were so robust and easy to maintain, and we had such a development backlog to address, that we kept them."
 
One of the major benefits of the new platform, according to Richardson, was enabling AJC to update the ASB website daily.  Previously, extracting the information from the mainframe database and transferring it to the website database had taken over 24 hours and was consequently only done once a fortnight, he said.

'With Windows it takes us four hours, so updates take place every evening and the records are available online the next day. It's a quantum leap in terms of getting information back to the breeders, and helping them process their breeding activities faster than was ever possible before,' said Richardson.   'One of the major objectives for the ASB was to provide online facilities for breeders to lodge the necessary documents that record the breeding process. The migration has allowed us to use the website as a front-end to the ASB application and to offer this service to our users.'
 
Since its launch in 1997, ASB's website ( http://www.studbook.org.au/) has grown to receive more than two million hits per month, and contain complete breeding records and pedigrees going back, in some cases, 300 years.
 
Keith Mante, country manager, Micro Focus Australia, said in a typical organisation, up to 80% of IT development time is lost to maintaining mainframe applications, with only 20% available for development work on new applications.
 
'Without the maintenance burden, organisations win back more time for real development work, resulting in greater productivity and business development,' said Mante. 'For ASB, the time saved on mainframe maintenance was used to develop new ways to identify thoroughbreds, and accelerated the rollout to the Internet. If it weren't for the new system it's unlikely the website would have progressed so quickly.'
 
ASB has recently added subscription access to the Stud Book website in response to the growing popularity of the portal and the additional resources needed to continually develop it.