ekz.bibliotheksservice GmbH

Ekz.bibliotheksservice GmbH is a German company with subsidiaries in Austria and France.

Founded in 1947, ekz.bibliotheksservice GmbH provides services and application software for public libraries. The ekz System I application was deployed in over 73 cities and currently administrates a repository of over 600,000 books, with over 20,000 publications added every month.

Business Situation

In year 2006, EZK was looking for an easy solution to modernize its iSeries application, written in RPG, to reach the following goals:

The RPG – based application, which consisted of more than 30 million database records, was converted to Microsoft C# and deployed as a full service migration with automated correctness test. The main concern of ekz was to maintain performance.

The Solution

Migrating the existing application was the only feasible approach for EZK. Rewriting the entire legacy application for a .NET or Java platform would have taken time not compatible with the time to market goal.

A team of developers from ekz and SYKORA-ML used SYKORA-ML’s migration tool ML-iMPACT to run initial diagnostics on the legacy code, as well convert the RPG and CL code to C#.

Benefits

• Absolute repeatability of the conversion
• Autonomy in new conversion/enhancements
• Ease of use (user friendly) and smart GUI
• Integration with MS Office instruments
• Client application on .NET platform
• Easy installation
• New look and feel
• Enhancements and additional functions
• The business logic of customer’s tried and trusted RPG and CL software is preserved
• The result enables further development and improvement of the migrated software to the industry standard programming language C# on the .NET environment without any limitations
• Customer will benefit from the powerful opportunities that .NET environment provides for modern software development
• Customer will save the capital invested to the development of the existing application
• No re-training of the application users is necessary
• The existing business processes do not need to be re-engineered to fit a standard software package
• The iSeries is used as a database server, preserving invested capital

The Customer

The "green-screen" environment of the iSeries application is not very "user friendly", and the means of control are keyboard orientated. The graphical interface offers only limited color tables. "The entire look of the application results from the original architecture that is obsolete in today’s environment," said Mr. Rene Hirsch the CIO of ekz.bibliotheksservice GmbH."

"Additionally, the application was quite brittle and difficult to integrate. These situations, coupled with the fact that ekz made a strategic decision to target the Microsoft.NET and Visual Studio market with this Library Application, suggested we had to undertake a massive modernization initiative."