21st Century Insurance Completes Mainframe Migration with Clerity

Business Wire, Inc.

Mainframe rehosting with UniKix delivers the same great legacy processing capabilities for less

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Clerity Solutions, a full-service provider of mainframe migration, modernization, and optimization solutions, said that 21st Century Insurance, part of the Farmers Insurance Group of Companies^®, selected Clerity to rehost a legacy mainframe application environment that ran on a mainframe for several years. Clerity was the only vendor that demonstrated it could deliver a true rehost of the entire legacy system, including CA Easytrieve Plus programs.

Using its UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software, Clerity’s migration services team successfully delivered an end-to-end solution that included project planning and management, application source code, and operational assessments, as well as application and data rehosting. The project was completed on time and on budget, meeting 21st Century’s objectives to reduce costs, protect existing business logic, maintain developer productivity and decommission its last remaining mainframe system.

“Now, we can deliver the same functionality at a far lower price,” said Tony Cacchione, 21st Century CIO. “Rehosting helped our organization move to a flexible, open systems environment and improved our application support team’s productivity. Clerity was an excellent partner, providing a steady pair of hands throughout the migration project and delivering the solution on time and on budget.”

After evaluating several alternatives, 21st Century determined that mainframe rehosting was the only viable option that could deliver the desired outcome. Unlike risky and time-consuming rewriting options, mainframe rehosting solutions preserve existing business logic and investments in legacy applications by moving custom applications to open systems platforms such as UNIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows. In order to select a specific vendor for the rehosting project, 21st Century included a proof of concept (POC) in the final stage of its decision-making process to ensure that all core business logic and functionality would be preserved during the move.

When all factors were considered, Clerity’s UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software and mainframe migration services were selected for the project. With UniKix Batch Processing Environment (BPE) software, the custom application environment could be moved efficiently to a cost-effective open systems environment within the desired timeframe.

21st Century’s application handles historic statutory reporting processes. It provides a large number of reports and files that are sent via FTP and SFTP to other open systems and mainframe environments. The application is comprised primarily of batch programs, written in COBOL and CA Easytrieve Plus, and Sequential files.

The CA Easytrieve programs are tightly integrated in the environment and much of the program code consists of “instream” Easytrieve code, where table file data and macro statements are mapped directly into a program.

As a result of intensive pre-project planning and design, a comprehensive plan was developed and clear mapping between the legacy mainframe environment and the new target open systems environment was established. The Clerity Mainframe Rehosting Reference Architecture was also used to assist the insurer in selecting infrastructure tools and utilities for its new target platform.

In addition to successfully rehosting the entire application environment to open systems, it was critical that the productivity of the application support team be maintained or enhanced during and post-migration.

This was accomplished through the selection of Clerity and third-party software solutions that replicate the mainframe development environment as closely as possible. On many occasions, some of the newly introduced solutions improved productivity (e.g., GUI-based source code development environments and debuggers).

The large and complex migration project took just eight months and testing/quality assurance took place over two additional months. Due to extensive planning and testing with several parallel runs, the production cutover process was error-free.

Moving the company’s last residual mainframe application to open systems is expected to deliver significant savings to 21st Century. By leveraging UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software, Clerity’s migration services team was not only able to address COBOL programs for the insurer, but also the complex CA Easytrieve Plus programs that were critical for report generation. Given the remaining useful life of this application, rewriting significant portions of the code base did not make sense.

About Clerity Solutions

Clerity is a leading, full-service provider of mainframe migration, modernization, and optimization solutions headquartered in Chicago, with offices worldwide. With over 17 years of experience and more than 1,300 installations, Clerity is uniquely positioned to assist organizations through all aspects of legacy migration. Visit http://www.clerity.com.

About 21st Century

21st Century Insurance is a trade name for a leading group of direct-to-consumer auto insurers in the United States. 21st Century is dedicated to providing customers with excellent coverage and award-winning service, and helping them save on auto insurance. Insuring more than 2 million vehicles across 49 states and Washington, D.C., 21st Century is also a proud part of the Farmers Insurance Group of Companies^®, the third largest personal lines insurer in the country. For more information, visit 21st.com or call (877) 310-5687 for a quote.

About Farmers Insurance

Farmers Insurance Group of Companies is the country's 3^rd largest insurer of both personal lines passenger automobile and homeowners insurance, and also provides a wide range of other insurance and financial services products. Farmers Insurance is proud to serve more than 10 million households with more than 20 million individual policies across all 50 states through the efforts of over 50,000 exclusive and independent agents and nearly 24,000 employees.

Farmers is a trade name and may refer to Farmers Group, Inc. or the Farmers Exchanges, as the case may be. Farmers Group, Inc., a management and holding company, along with its subsidiaries, is wholly owned by the Zurich Financial Services Group. The Farmers Exchanges are three reciprocal insurers (Farmers Insurance Exchange, Fire Insurance Exchange and Truck Insurance Exchange), including their subsidiaries and affiliates, owned by their policyholders, and managed by Farmers Group, Inc. and its subsidiaries. For more information about Farmers, visit its Web site www.farmers.com or www.Facebook.com/FarmersInsurance.