Acucorp Completes HP e3000 Application Migration Project with L'Oreal Mexico
San Diego, CA – November 18, 2003 – Acucorp, Inc., an international developer of legacy application extension solutions, today announced the completion of an HP e3000 application migration project with L'Oreal Mexico, a subsidiary of the French cosmetics giant L'Oreal. The project involved moving the company's 16-year-old manufacturing program from the discontinued HP e3000 server line to the HP ProLiant DL740 platform running Windows 2000 Advanced Server with MSSQL Server. Using Acucorp's extend® software solutions as well as Transoft's Legacy Liberator toolset and migration services, L'Oreal was able to preserve their application's existing COBOL code and business logic–dramatically reducing the time and expense it would have taken to re-write their 400-program production, distribution and quality control system.
"We knew that because of the complexity of our program, purchasing a new application or re-engineering our existing one was not an option," explains Jesús Solórzano, IT Manager at L'Oreal. "With Acucorp's technologies, we were able to easily migrate to a new platform while still retaining our application's Visual Basic front end and user-preferred, character-based interface."
The entire project took eight months to complete, and included ample time for L'Oreal's developers to migrate their system from HP COBOL II to Acucorp's ACUCOBOL-GT®, become familiar with the new development environment, create additional programs using the flexible computing language, and re-work their remaining business systems. Four of those eight months were spent doing intensive conversion work and testing.
"It's rare that a project actually falls within the allotted budget and timeline," says Solórzano. "But this conversion came in right on budget at $240,000, and the only delay with the timeline resulted from our decision to make code modifications due to inevitable changes in the production line."
With ACUCOBOL-GT and Acucorp's other COBOL modernization solutions, L'Oreal's development team plans to enhance its existing business system, possibly adding to its Visual Basic front end by incorporating additional graphical user interfaces–ultimately improving productivity among the 100 employees of its Xochimilco, Mexico facility that use the application. L'Oreal is also now in a position to take advantage of Acucorp's other life-after-migration strategies, including improved application interoperability (with computing languages and environments like .NET, XML, Java, and C#) and data access to non-COBOL data sources and relational database management systems.
"These life-after-migration technologies are designed to help businesses just like L'Oreal optimize and leverage their investments in proven code and data well beyond the initial migration," explains Joe Seiley, Acucorp's Director of Strategic Partnerships.
As a result of L'Oreal's successful application migration, the company dramatically lowered its total cost of ownership while achieving an excellent return on investment. L'Oreal, which was paying $45,000 a year for hardware support on its HP e3000 server, will now pay $1,900 every three years for its ProLiant machine.
"Acucorp's innovative technologies and responsive customer service have changed our business forever," Solórzano says. "We're not only saving money, but we're able to keep our application and open it up to a whole new set of technologies."
In addition to the successful migration of L'Oreal's manufacturing application, Acucorp has assisted other companies with the transition of their mission-critical business systems from the HP e3000 to any of the more than 600 computing platforms supported by extend. These companies include McWilliam's Winery and Sharikat Khoo in Australia; Ascoli S.p.A. in Italy; CDM Software Services in the United Kingdom; Huhtamaki Deutschland, Telekurs, and Töpfer GmbH & Co. in Germany; and Dairylea Cooperative Inc., The John Henry Company, and Steel Warehouse in the United States.
About Acucorp
Founded in 1988 and celebrating its 15th anniversary, Acucorp, Inc., an HP Business Partner, is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, California, with additional offices in Great Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Acucorp's products are distributed in more than 75 countries throughout the world, and its technology users include Ford Argentina, Red Cross Belgium, Sanyo Extended Data Systems, Seagram Americas, Siemens, The Travelex Group (formerly Thomas Cook), Tower Records, and Warner Music Group. The company continues to design, develop, and market robust solutions for extending the life of inherited COBOL applications.
####
Acucorp, extend and ACUCOBOL-GT are registered trademarks of Acucorp, Inc. All other trademarks used are the property of their respective owners.
