Since the HP CSY announcement on November 14th we have visited many sites and had hundreds of people attend our migration webinars. The major points are:
1) five years is a long time,
2) this is a business issue NOT a technical issue, and
3) the planning should start as soon as possible so that you know the timing for your organization of this transition. In many ways this will need the same kind of high level organizational support and attention that Y2K received a couple of years ago.

We have built a special migration team here at MBFoster. The experience includes 118 years of migration experience, 195 years of MPE experience, 62 years of HP-UX experience, 150+ years of database experience and 117 years of IT architecture experience. In addition we have partnered with industry applications specialists to provide a comprehensive solution.

From this team we gathered the best practices and developed a plan to help make the migrations for our customers successful. There are several ways we can help your organization:

1) Attend our Webinar - check our website for the next one - it is FREE and informative - it gives you a chance to see our business focused approach to the migration. You should have your CFO or VP Operations attend so they can see the issues that need to be investigate and can start the budgeting process.

2) Participate in a one-day on-site workshop - a facilitated workshop, which focuses on your organization and how you can use this as an opportunity to align business and IT. We will need some information in advance about your business, the applications and your directions. The major thing will be making sure the business unit managers are in attendance to help the process. Key users who know the applications they currently work with will also be required.

3) A more comprehensive analysis can be performed with one day per application plus the one-day onsite. Deliverables would outline on an application-by-application basis, the current state, and the fit with the current business process. We will also build a skills matrix to help identify expertise available and required.

4) The high level analysis will lead to a plan for the migration. This is beyond basic project planning as it involves the co-ordination of tasks across systems and applications as a phased migration takes place or the co-ordination of many tasks if a "big bang" approach is better suited to your needs. Each of these planning exercises is tailored to your organization and quoted separately.

If you have Questions contact me at 1-800-ANSWERS.

We think that the biggest thing is not to panic but to proceed to examine the impact this announcement might have on your organization. This is an opportunity to examine the IT to business fit, and improve for efficiency and supportability reasons.

So remember, migration is not a technical problem, yes technology plays a role but about 60% of the effort is in understanding the current fit between the business processes and IT. Time must be spent analyzing the business processes, and the applications that support them. The inventory of the whole organization and its processes is required as a starting point. A look at the strategic direction will help you find the fit going forward and help to recognize the needs of the organization.

We have designed some new technology based on MBF-UDALink that will help you in the migration process. MBF-UDALink has always had powerful data mapping technology built in, which can help extract and map data building loader files for RDBMSes. Now we are working to extract schema information and build the results on the new platform as an Oracle, SQLServer or DB2 database. A visual mapper will let you select tables, and fields to drag and drop from source to target. We think this will help in migration projects.

Remember you can 'Take It With You', several years ago we designed a program for our customers who were looking for investment protection. MBF-UDALink is available at special pricing for Unix platforms including HP-UX, SUN and AIX. We provide connectors to do cross-platform transactions and data access with HPe3000, HP9000, NT, SUN, RS6000(AIX), and AS400 (i400). If you would like more info click here to read about MBF-Enterprise.

Remember MBF-UDALink is one of the best data mappers on the planet … so you already have a great tool for your migration. However you can extend its usefulness with looking at our Data Marts.

Your organization could use a Data Mart to format data for more convenient for reporting. Our Data Mart solution may well allow your organization to get the information out of your existing systems into a better format for reporting which has the convenient side effect of being application neutral.

Data Marts will allow you to have the choice of building extracts from any new system to also populate the Data Mart and help with year over year comparisons.

This way you get two streams of benefits - it will be easier reporting today for end user access to data, and less IT involvement in the reporting and data analysis environment. The second stream of benefits will start after the migration because of the continuity of the data.

Another step you can take is to deploy Reveal™. Reveal is a platform neutral way of capturing the spool files from any print source in your organization - HP e3000, Unix, NT, even IBM mainframe. It manages the document through its lifecycle from creation to disposal without ever having to print the whole document. Documents are made available via a secure JavaWeb browser interface. Each user gets access to just the pages they are allowed and they can view and print on demand.

In a Migration scenario this allows the archiving of reports, which can then be reproduced on demand, long after the source platform has been decommissioned. This can be also used for the providing a report portal. All the reports regardless of the platform they came from can be accessed in one place. This can save the users from having to know how to log on to several different platforms, and avoid giving access to operational platforms.

Thank you for all your business, I hope we will get to serve you in your migration, and data access and delivery needs in the near future. Do not hesitate to call me at 1-800-ANSWERS or visit www.mbfoster.com.

Last winter in the recognition that the world would be moving towards cross-platform data access we renamed DataExpress to MBF-UDALink.

In the spring we released new solutions in the MBF-UDALink family that included secure ODBC, RPC with Com Builder, and XA Compliant 2 phase commit for HP3000 or HP9000 to NT platforms. [These all permit better cross platform integration especially for Web or Internet deployment]

The summer at our Customer Conference attendees got to see these newest members of the MBF-UDALink family and preview some of the classes we have created for customer education. We also went to HP World Conference where we had a great turn out at our booth.

The fall brought September 11th, which changed the world we live in. Since then, I have personally done 18 flights and see a lot of change everywhere. Projects were disrupted all over our customer base. It took till November for things to settle into a "new normal" and projects to move back on schedule.

We are also providing services for customers to get an assessment of their specific situation so that better planning can result. More in depth assessment will allow our team to plan the transition with your team down to the detailed project plan level. We will custom produce a transition/migration plan and help identify resources to assist in the migration process. If you want assistance drop us a note at migration@mbfoster.com.

Great news for UDALink customers - You Can Take It With You! Not only is MBF-UDALink a great tool to have when you need to migrate data but it also will run in HP-UX, NT and other Unix environments. If you need to do a phased migration MBF-Enterprise can link between databases on different platforms providing 2 phase commit. Whether the architecture is .NET/COM based or JAVA based we can provide the underlying data access and transaction management.

So here we are at the end of the year looking forward to 2002 and what it brings - I wish each and every one of you a wonderful holiday season and prosperity in the New Year. I trust we will see you on the road or at one of our webcasts or seminars. Let us know if there is anything we can do to make a difference for you and your organization!

Thank You for your support.