Cognizant serves up mainframe-to-Windows migration to foods supplier Schwan

It was the classic "good news/bad news." Schwan Food Co., a global frozen foods provider headquartered in Marshall, Minn., was growing profitably, but its hybrid computer environment couldn't efficiently manage the growth. Custom business applications ran on a mainframe under OS/390, and SAP ERP ran on PC servers under the Microsoft Server 2003 operating system. The company supported six major applications and three databases.

"It was too much," says Kate McNulty, senior VP and CIO of the privately held company. "We needed to reduce the complexity so as to reduce operational costs—the redundant costs of maintaining so many environments."

In addition to reducing costs, the company wanted to make it easier for 10,000 users to navigate some 30 custom applications on a daily basis. The seven million lines of custom mainframe COBOL code built up over 25 years was becoming too cumbersome to effectively maintain and upgrade.

"A fundamental requirement was to move to a platform with performance equal to or greater than the mainframe," McNulty says. The company decided to migrate off the mainframe to run exclusively in the Microsoft .NET environment, but the question was how.

Schwan enlisted Cognizant, a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider, for help. A key challenge was planning how to schedule a complex migration of interrelated applications with minimal disruption to the business. Cognizant chose to divide the set of mainframe applications into five relatively separate releases for phased porting. Rather than recompiling the COBOL code into COBOL.NET and relying on middleware for the link, Schwan opted to create new, native .NET-connected applications to take full advantage of the speed, flexibility, and extensibility of .NET.

"We were willing to invest in a highly agile system that would support growth and provide competitive advantage for years to come," McNulty explains.

The migration reduced complexity while maintaining or improving performance. The company also expects to reap $1 million annual savings by retiring the mainframe, reducing maintenance and development costs, and speeding time-to-benefit for new applications. Schwan reduced its code base by 85 percent by migrating to the Windows Server platform, and gained 30 percent more computing power in the process. It also is more responsive now to user requests, boosting user productivity by 10 percent via easier system navigation. In addition to hard dollar gains, month-end financial closing effort was reduced 70 percent.