St. Paul Insurances
Automate to accumulate
Seamus Quinn, editor of News/400.uk, conducted the following interview with Gary Metherell of St Paul Insurances on the completion of their Year 2000 programme.
The St Paul is a group of insurance companies that specializes in property-liability and life insurance cover as well as reinsurance products and services worldwide. The American Fortune 500 company was founded in Minnesota in 1853. One of the company's divisions is St Paul International Underwriting which provides property and liability insurance worldwide through operations in domestic insurance markets and at Lloyd's of London, and serves multinationals through Global Accounts and Foreign Risk services. The division's UK office is based in Redhill, Surrey.
The UK operation's IT Service Delivery Manager is Gary Metherell, a true AS/400 veteran who started in IT at bankers Coutts in the late 70s and then moved to Lombard Tricity Finance in 1981 where he installed the company's first AS/400 machines which replaced System 38s. He then worked for Bluebird Software for two years as a Systems Engineer, configuring, ordering and installing a number of large AS/400s around the UK. Since his move to The St Paul he has been in charge of installing a number of remote offices around the world.
His choice of Y2K conversion tool was X-2000 from Databorough. The idea behind X-2000 is that it expands all your data fields from two to four digits. The solution performs the minimum conversion to the programs necessary for all functions to continue working beyond 2000, in exactly the same way as they did before. It automates the changes to all code (data structures, byte swapping logic, arithmetic operations, string handling etc). Similarly, the database is automatically converted, with a parameterized rule routine that determines the correct century. X-2000 also automatically alters the source code of the programs and recompiles all the software using a change management system.
X-2000 is based on X-Analysis, Databorough's AS/400 specific Reverse Engineering tool which first hit the market ten years ago. X-2000 itself was first launched in 1994, just as more prescient IT managers were waking up to the potential dangers that Y2K could pose to their businesses. The X-2000 process consists of several stages. Firstly, the system is imported into X-Analysis' repository. Then problematic date fields are identified which leads to a full Y2K impact analysis evaluation report. What follows is a process of automated conversion of Database File Source Code and a recompilation of the database. Then comes an automated conversion of RPG, CL and DDS Source Code followed by automatic recompilation of all the affected AS/400 objects. Databorough also automatically generates the data conversion and data ageing programs needed for testing and implementation.
Other recent additions to the X-2000 'family' are X-2000 for COOL:2E, Query2000 for the AS/400 query system and the AS/400 date validation tool Test2000.
News/400.uk's Seamus Quinn spoke to Gary Metherell about his choice of conversion tool and how successful it had been.
NEWS/400.uk: Tell us a little about the history and set-up of your AS/400 based systems and applications and what they are used for.
GM: We have two main AS/400s, one in the US and the other in the UK. The UK one supports the Europe and South Africa and the US system supports South America. We run Creative Insure 90 software on both of the systems.
NEWS/400.uk: X-2000 is a fully automated approach to Y2K conversion. At what point in time did you realize that this was the best approach for you to take and why?
GM: We realized very early on that the X-2000 was for us because other tools only did 75% of the work, if you were lucky. Also, we would have to have had a dedicated team to do the work, plus the additional 25%. X-2000 allowed us to spend more time on getting it right and somebody else, Databorough, did all the conversion. Also X-2000 did 99% of the work. X-2000 also allowed us to carry on with our developing right up until we pushed the button to convert the final cut of the system.
NEWS/400.uk: There is an incredible array of Y2K fixes and solutions on the market. How did you end up going with Databorough?
GM: Allan Fletcher of IT Support Services, based in Chepstow, convinced us at a seminar he put together about the problems with conversion tools, and the benefits of using X-2000. We were lucky that we had not spent a great deal of time looking into other solutions.
NEWS/400.uk: How much did Databorough's technical approach to the task influence your choice?
GM: We liked the professional approach to the way Databorough handled the initial evaluation of our system. Also we were able to have a fixed price contract so we knew exactly how much it was going to cost us. The use of a single subroutine also impressed us as we could see exactly what was going on within the code.
NEWS/400.uk: How long did the whole process take from beginning to end? Plus, more specifically, how long did the conversion to database file source code/automatic recompilation of your database? Similarly, how long did the conversion and recompilation of RPG programs take?
GM: The project from handing the code to going live took approximately eleven months. In this time we probably had delays of around seven months due to other commitments along the way. This was all planned for as we had a number of system changes to get done before the final cut of the system was converted. Our system is about 32 gig in total and it took one weekend to build the object libraries, and just seventeen hours to convert the databases on our 530 2152.
NEWS/400.uk: When the conversion process was finished, how did you test your systems? For instance did you use Databorough's Test2000 or someone else's product/methodology?
GM: We used Auto Tester, the PC based testing tool, to do all the system testing and Creative's test plan. The testing was done on a stand alone 150. This allowed us to test without impacting any other work.
NEWS/400.uk: How happy with the results are you?
GM: We are very happy with the results as we have only had a few problems, some of which were caused by ourselves in the initial analysis work. I can honestly say that not one program has fallen over during any part of the project to convert the system.
NEWS/400.uk: Do you have any further Y2K projects in your organization that still need implementation? If so, what are you going to do?
GM: We still have some other smaller versions of the system used in other countries which are waiting for conversion. We've built our conversion model now with Databorough. But our base systems have some slight variations, so we're tweaking our X-2000 model right now ready to implement in South America and Spain.
NEWS/400.uk: With Y2K over as a mission critical task for you, what technological areas are you moving your focus to in the future?
GM: We are now working towards consolidating our servers onto the AS/400. We now have a number of production Domino severs running native on the AS/400 and an NT server on an IPCS serving our workflow images via Domino. We have just taken delivery of a 720 for our new Internet site and have also ordered a 730 to replace our 530.
