Hermes migrates from mainframe to open systems environment

The home delivery company selected Clerity for the migration

European home delivery company Hermes has migrated its UK mainframe-based parcel delivery application to an open systems environment to help staff do their jobs faster and reduce hardware costs.

Hermes used mainframe migration services provider Clerity's UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software and Syncsort's DMExpress data integration software for the migration.

The company manages more than 140 million parcel deliveries and collections a year in the UK and looked to migrate off the mainframe and consolidate into centralised European datacentres.

Mike Leyland, IT director at Hermes UK, told Computing that the migration from the mainframe was part of the company's overall strategy to become independent from its original parent company, a UK retailer, in its IT provision.

"We wanted to have complete autonomy to be able to deliver an IT strategy for our business.

"We needed to do something in terms of our core IT service provision and the route we wished to take was to come off the mainframe to an open systems platform which gives us many advantages in the way we liaise and work with the bulk of our customers," he said.

Leyland said that the move to an open systems environment was not driven by cost reduction but mainly to boost performance levels.

"The IBM Z OS mainframe that we had was running out of capacity, and we could have invested further on it, but it was becoming a little fruitless. And at the rate we were growing it was not a long-term strategy for us to get these applications and processes performing on a mainframe.

"On this open systems platform, we are seeing jobs running much faster than they did before, potentially up to seven times faster," he said.

Hermes decided to migrate its central mainframe Cobol and IBM CICS applications, which run the company's entire UK parcel distribution network, to open systems.

The company selected Clerity for the mainframe migration project after a tendering process in which Hermes looked at many of Clerity's competitors.

"We chose Clerity because of its installed base, proven track record and most importantly its proof of concept performance," he said.

The migration process started in April 2010 and was completed before the target date in October 2011.

"The new system went live ahead of our peak period and has already handled record-level business volumes," said Leyland.

Hermes developers are given training from Clerity to ensure that they know how the system works and this is on-going.