A large multi-national financial organisation required a team to support its IMS and DB2 Production environment and was unable to resource the positions from its existing permanent staff or its list of approved suppliers. It had found that gaining mainframe legacy skills is no longer the preferred route of junior staff, and that they would prefer to become involved in the areas of new technology. Similarly, its outsourcing partners from the newer geographical centres of IT simply did not have the requisite level of knowledge or experience to support the core systems.

Legacy Data Systems was able to supply a small team of consultants at a fixed price for the eighteen-month project, and was able to save the organisation over fifty per cent of its production support budget for that period. The wide breadth of knowledge of the Legacy Data Systems team enabled the project to be supported by far fewer resources than previously.

The effective net cost to the organisation of engaging Legacy Data Systems was zero, as the consultants were able, in addition to the ongoing support duties, to suggest improvements and efficiences that enabled the organisation to save in excess of the cost of the engagement. This was a substantiated exercise, and can be verified by the organisation concerned.

The Legacy Data Systems team also:

• Provided significant and vital guidance and support for the Euro Currency Conversion Project.
  
  
• Became a centre of technical expertise for Development and Production Support following the loss of many permanent technical staff.
  
  
• Initiated a drive to reduce the numbers of Production online transaction abends to improve the general performance of the online systems.
  
  
• Completed a conversion of all eligible IMS database reorganizations to use BMC Concurrent Reorganisation creating a significant increase in Production Database Online availability.
  
  
• Created an initiative to improve the checkpointing efficiency of every program that accesses IMS and/or DB2 databases.
  
  
• Initiated a process in partnership with the Change Management Team to ensure that no new program is written, tested or released without the required level of checkpointing being included in the code.
  
  
• Provided the Testing Centre of Excellence with technical backup and assistance during the absence of key staff and in times of excessive work demands.