Migration is the topic of the moment. An increasing number of companies are considering the undertaking. Whether the goal is to reduce IT operating costs, tame server farms or move to a more reliable platform, migration is becoming an attractive option. But before taking the plunge, many questions must be asked, resources and skills must be evaluated and future objectives must be outlined.
To help explain what a migration process entails, IBM's John Nelson, Director of AMS C&M (Application Services Conversion and Migration) discusses what to expect and how IBM is helping businesses navigate through the journey.
Q: Why is migration such a hot topic right now?
A: One of the things we're finding now is that the need to migrate to new platforms is something that's accumulated over time. There have been continuing improvements in price performance of hardware over the last few years.
We find that many customers are interested in looking at their long-term hardware strategy because they've had multiple types of hardware proliferate throughout their organization and have found this situation to be costly to support. They're now looking for alternatives to better manage their existing costs and future investments, while improving their quality of service. These objectives have led some customers to move to a more cost-effective, consolidated hardware and software product set that positions them best for the future. IBM is focused on helping customers accelerate the move to target platforms by making migration as inexpensive and easy as possible.
Sometimes customers are being forced into migration when some of their older products are no longer supported by their vendors and they want to avoid the risk of operating their business on unsupported products. We call these "end of life" products, which applies to hardware such as HP 3000, Unisys mainframes, Bull mainframes or other older platforms no longer supported. In this situation, a customer has to select which platforms they want to use in the future and map out a migration strategy and plan.
Q: Price is usually a significant factor for choosing migration, but what other factors are involved in the equation?
A: As some companies are making these important future platform decisions, we're finding they're very interested in understanding and comparing the strategic direction of their existing and future technology partners. For example, many customers have indicated that they're re-evaluating their relationship with Sun because they're concerned about long-term stability and support to meet their business requirements. Other key customer migration considerations are the availability of skilled resources to support their current and target platforms, and the requirements to retrain their existing support team to support new target platforms.
Q: From your perspective, are you seeing an increase in businesses choosing migration?
A: Yes, we definitely are finding increased interest in migration assistance especially over the last six months. This change is a global trend and has driven IBM to increase our capacity to better support our customers.
Q: What are some of the checkpoints businesses should keep in mind when contemplating a migration project?
A: Customers considering migration should first ask themselves if there's a realistic overall transition plan and budget. A complete plan should include how long migration will take, how much it's going to cost and what are some of the dependencies and risks. Understanding the full path from beginning to end is important.
As part of planning a migration, we see a strong dependency on third-party products as companies are migrating from one platform to another. Companies should ask if those products are required on the target platform.
For many customers, data migration is a unique challenge. With so many real-time databases today, companies can't shut down like they used to for a migration—they really have to keep running 24-7. So when trying to actually implement this and turn the switch at the end, it's important to think about the data migration strategy.
We sometimes look at data migration backwards—what must be done at the very end—and make sure all of the planning up to that point is done to be successful versus thinking of it only a phase or step at a time. We normally review the entire project life cycle up front to make sure everything performed along the way supports the overall business and technical requirements as an integrated plan.
A comprehensive migration plan should also consider the training and transition of the existing support team's skills to support the target platform. If a company has a staff that knows one technology and it's switching to another, how will it transition them to support the new technology?
Also, is there enough capacity in terms of project staff and equipment to conduct the migration project? For example, when preparing to migrate to a new platform, companies may need excess resources for things like testing and conversion. It's not uncommon to see schedules slip if key resources aren't dedicated to a migration project.
Companies also have to think about how to evaluate it from a testing standpoint. Is there an existing set of test data, or is it something that will need to be created? Testing is the only way to determine whether the transition has been successful.
Q: Once a business has decided it is in its best interest to migrate, what should they expect during the process?
A: The first thing to expect is a review of their existing application environment to understand the scope of what needs to be migrated—the core applications, data involved and any related third-party products. Companies must ensure that the required third-party products from their existing platform will be available on the target platform.
We basically call this upfront review process an "assessment" in terms of making sure we understand everything a company has, what are the potential issues in migrating and laying out a plan or a list of the required activities to perform. This provides a timeframe and fits into the overall cost of the migration.
The next thing is to actually migrate or update the components that need to be moved over, whether it's a custom application or a packaged application that requires some updated customization. And so we're modifying the core set of applications and components that we're moving from the current platform to the target. It may be a matter of coordinating the third-party providers, as well.
After modifying existing components, testing is performed to make sure the system will operate in the target environment as it did in the original source environment. And then the last piece is to do the implementation and data conversion. We make sure that we're able to do the data conversion, and then implement it while providing business continuity.
Q: How is IBM making the migration process a smooth one for businesses?
A: These migration capabilities are key to enabling our customers to move forward to newer technology and realize benefits. So one of the first things we did last year to augment our internal capabilities was to acquire the majority of Sector7, a porting services company that was based in Austin, Texas. And we're continually investing in training and tools and establishing global delivery capabilities with the overall focus on determining how we can continually lower the time and cost of migration. And we also look at how to take advantage of process improvements and migration software tools available both internally and externally that would help lower this cost of migration.
IBM has established the Migration Factory to enable our sales team to provide pre-sales support in terms of addressing requests for information about migrating a customer's existing environment. In some cases, the customers may want to do the work themselves; other times they may want a Business Partner to help them. The Migration Factory explores the possibility of modifying IBM products over time to make them easier to implement.
The Migration Factory is able to leverage a lot of the experience and lessons learned from inside IBM as well as the capability we've acquired from Sector7 to be able to go into a new migration situation with prior understanding of the key issues. We've completed hundreds of migrations already so this helps to lower the risk as well as the time that we think it's going to take for the migration. We think this experience is going to be important for our customers in being able to help them migrate quickly as well as understand the considerations up front instead of finding them out later during the process.
Q: Do you expect the pSeries system to be a big player in migration?
A: Yes, the pSeries team has been very aggressive in terms of leveraging the Migration Factory—both in the United States and globally. They have used this migration capability very effectively to help replace competitive platforms, especially HP and Sun. And there are some specialized offerings that the pSeries server has that leverage the Migration Factory.
For more information contact your local IBM sales rep or call 1-866-MIGR8TE.
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