Case Study: SSP chooses the most flexible, cost-effective and risk-free approach
to migrate its 9,5M LOC application to .NET
UK-based, global ISV for the financial and insurance sectors licensed ArtinSoft’s
Visual Basic Upgrade Companion and ensured a quick, natural transition to a newer
technology without any constraints by extensive third-party libraries.
Situation
Customer Profile
SSP is a leading provider of IT solutions to the global insurance and financial
services industries, with almost 50,000 users in over 50 countries.
Business situation
S4i is a 9,5M LOC application that handles all aspects of insurance policy administration,
insurance accounting, document management and reporting. It was written in VB6.0
and SSP needed to move it to the .NET platform to ensure application advancement
and staff availability.
Solution
SSP evaluated several options, including a manual rewrite, and using the Upgrade
Wizard or a competitor’s tool, and came to the conclusion that the Visual
Basic Upgrade Companion was the best option because of its flexibility, customization
capabilities and the fact that it generated native .NET code instead of relying
on an extensive support library.
Benefits
Moving to .NET will alleviate any possible concerns about support, and will enable
the use of new technologies that will be applied to enhance and add value to the
application.
Using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion will allow SSP to reach the project goals
quickly and at a much lower cost and risk. And by getting the application onto .NET
without being constrained by a third-party’s rigid approach, SSP will be able
to move forward and provide a solution that will work in the long term.
SSP is a global IT company that delivers consultancy and software solutions to help
brokers, insurers and financial advisers throughout the world provide a better service
to customers. Headquartered in Halifax UK, SSP has offices in Birmingham, the South
of England, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand,
Kenya, India and the United States.
With over 25 years of experience in the insurance and financial services sectors,
SSP has a strong customer base of almost 50,000 users in over 50 countries, including
20 of the top 50 global insurers, 30 of the top 50 UK brokers, and 4 of the top
10 UK financial advisers. Their systems support an estimated £2.0 billion
of UK personal lines gross written premium, and £2.9 billion of UK commercial
lines gross written premium.
Comprised of about 9.5 million lines of source code, S4i is a full-featured, end-to-end
policy administration suite that deliverers policy issuance, re-insurance, claims
management, customer management and full accounting functionality for a range of
personal and commercial lines insurance.
The comprehensive insurance policy management application is an in-house developed
system, with a version specific for customers in the United Kingdom and another
version used worldwide. It has a highly modular architecture and can be installed
at customer’s sites or it can also be hosted and provided as a service. The
normal deployment consists of one or several Citrix servers that provide access
to all the components of the application, with a separate server providing database
access.
S4i was written in Visual Basic 6.0, and SSP was looking towards upgrading it to
the .NET platform as VB6 no longer provided the tools they needed. Even though the
runtime is still supported on the operating systems that Microsoft supplies, in
order to take the product forward SSP needed to move to a newer technology.
So there were basically four main drivers for the migration:
- Application advancement: SSP wants to start using all the new features and development
capabilities provided within the .NET framework.
- Platform Refresh: SSP has a long term plan of moving the application to a new SOA-based
paradigm. This evolution will be made in stages, with the .NET migration being the
first step.
- Customer demand: SSP has always made a commitment to their current customers to
stay on top of any new technologies.
- Staffing: recruiting new staff with the Visual Basic 6.0 skill set is becoming more
difficult.
Solution
SSP evaluated several modernization options, from a manual rewrite to using an automated
tool, like the Upgrade Wizard that ships with Microsoft Visual Studio and other
third party products.
“The Upgrade Wizard does a good job, but it is not flexible and it is more
applicable to small scale applications. On the other hand, we evaluated your main
competitor’s tool and thought the approach was too rigid, requiring embedding
their runtime within the migrated application. Plus we were looking at the long
term, refreshing the technology beyond just moving to a new platform, but being
able to move forward and provide our customers with a solution that will work for
the next 10+ years. To me that meant getting the application onto .NET without being
constrained by someone else’s rigid approach”, noted Robert
Courtney, SSP’s Chief Software Architect.
“We chose the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion because of the flexibility that
it provides, and because we can get pure .NET code, as opposed to someone else’s
third-party library. It was not just the tool itself but the actual engagement with
ArtinSoft; the way we can analyze the code and discuss how we want it to look, and
then customize and configure the tool accordingly”, added Courtney.
The project entailed a high level of complexity, considering the size of the application
and the presence of a large number of third-party and Microsoft components, plus
the interaction with VBScript code. The application employs several controls that
relate to the user interface. Many of these components are currently supported by
the standard version of the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion (VBUC) and will be converted
to native .NET components with a very high automation percentage, while others will
be left as they are and will be accessed through COM Interop. For example, ADO and
DAO will be upgraded to ADO.NET using the classes defined in the System.Data.Common
namespace. Some customizations were also added to the tool, either to increase the
overall automation or to comply with SSP’s specific target requirements.
In the end, SSP licensed a customized version of the VBUC. The project will be performed
by SSP's resources in their India development center, with initial on-site training
and support by an ArtinSoft migration expert. S4i has always been developed in Visual
Basic and though moving to C# is supported by VBUC, SSP felt that it might imply
more refactoring of their specific code, therefore VB.NET was chosen as the target
language. So S4i will be migrated from Visual Basic 6.0 to VB.NET, and from Windows
2003 with SQL Server 2000 to MS Windows Server 2008 on SQL Server 2008.
Benefits
Using the Visual Basic Upgrade Companion will allow SSP to reach the project goals
quickly and at a much lower cost than a manual rewrite. “A manual rewrite
would have been harder and would have entailed a much higher risk. Using the VBUC
allowed considerable savings and approaching the project in a much more controlled
manner”, stated Courtney.
The standard tool already offers the ability for end users to create new migration
rules or mappings according to the specific needs, reducing manual intervention
to fix migrated code and compilation and runtime errors. These user-defined transformations
can be applied to upgrade ActiveX libraries and user components into native .NET
libraries or third-party equivalents, enhancing the migration process by creating
personalized mappings to handle conflicting or particular elements, as well as increasing
existing support for legacy components. The inclusion of additional customizations
to the migration engine will increase even further the automatic conversion coverage
in line with SSP’s requirements.
SSP has initiated a substantial investment in a Technical Refresh Programme for
S4i and is committed to an ongoing alignment to relevant MS technology releases.
The migration of S4i to .NET is the first phase of this program. Later phases will
look to further enhance S4i capability by utilizing appropriate modern MS technology
with SOA enablement, web channel delivery and product definition receiving enhancement.
.NET is Microsoft’s premiere development platform, designed from the ground
up to overcome many of the problems prevalent in application development. Namely,
long development times, inability to change applications quickly, high total cost
of ownership of software, and ease of deployment. Microsoft is committed to .NET
as a foundation to their technology roadmap and are increasingly using it in their
product releases. SSP clients can therefore be assured that the move to .NET will
provide a stable, future focused platform for S4i moving forward.