Christie’s successfully completes migration of legacy auction system with Micro Focus and Transoft

Friday, 09 October 2009 07:41

World’s leading art business achieves roll-out of new application in 12 cities

Micro Focus® (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application modernisation, testing and management solutions, today announces the successful completion of an application migration project for Christie’s, the world's leading art business. Micro Focus’ long-term partner Transoft, experts in helping companies evolve their existing legacy applications, migrated Christie’s critical property auction system “PROPERTY” from an ageing Data General (DG) system to an open and more flexible Windows Server 2003 environment. Christie’s used Micro Focus Net Express to recompile the original code into Micro Focus COBOL for execution on the new platform, and Transoft’s Legacy Liberator to automate the migration process and hence shorten delivery times, minimise costs and ensure the quality of the migration.

Some of Christie’s business IT systems, including the PROPERTY system, were based on end-of-life DG hardware, operating and data management systems. DG ceased manufacturing these systems in the mid-1990s and software products were revision-locked at the same time. Although these systems were supported, replacement parts were becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.

Andy Foster, Christie’s Chief Operating Officer, commented, “The system that runs a key part of the main operations of Christie’s business has been developed over the last 20+ years and contains customised functionality to support the unique nature of Christie’s business. However, the system’s continued dependency on the DG mainframe was viewed as an unacceptable business risk. With there being no possible package replacement for the system, migration offered the quickest, cheapest and minimum risk option.”

Christie’s undertook extensive system and usability testing of the newly migrated application, after which Christie’s was able to implement it in London, New York, Hong Kong and in offices in a further nine cities across the world.

Stuart McGill, Chief Technology Officer, Micro Focus commented, “The option to rewrite systems from scratch or replace them proved to be far too costly and risky for Christie’s. The alternative to modernise their core assets by migrating to a Windows platform significantly lowered this cost and mitigated all associated risk. This is a demonstration of the value that lies in existing systems and how organisations are able to extract more value from them if they look to exploit them accordingly. Micro Focus, together with our partner Transoft, is delighted to have helped Christie’s reuse their existing assets and is looking forward to assisting the organisation with its ongoing modernisation strategy.”