Banks and industrial companies can escape the mainframe cost trap

Stuttgart, 22.02.2022 - Many banks and industrial companies still rely on mid-20th century technologies to operate their mainframe systems. As a result, these "steam engines of IT" have often become cost traps, applying a handbrake to technological progress. A complete solution for moving to the cloud would therefore provide a great relief to many businesses.

The mainframes that many companies still use are extremely costly to maintain. Employees who are familiar with them have become rare. Consequently, operating and maintenance costs for mainframes are one of the fastest growing IT expenses. GFT and Astadia are to now provide a seamless transformation process with the Astadia FastTrack Factory, a complete, scalable and maintainable mainframe migration platform.

Whilst migrating mainframes remains a complex undertaking, the FastTrack Factory makes the transition as simple as can be. GFT utilise the FastTrack Factory with clients to create functionally identical modern applications that can be deployed immediately.

"As part of the development of FastTrack Factory - the only fully automated migration software platform on the market - Astadia is working with GFT and joint customers to migrate mainframe applications to the cloud or distributed environments in the shortest possible time," said Scott G. Silk, chairman and CEO of Astadia.

Numerous joint migration projects

The strategic partnership between GFT and Astadia is based on successful joint projects with Astadia's subsidiary Anubex, which has been part of the Astadia family since 2021. Together, the partners have transferred the application landscapes of numerous customers into new decentralised system environments over several years, benefiting from the high availability and scalable power of cloud solutions.

"The intelligent use of cloud services have become a catalyst for competitiveness and innovation for companies in all industries. The transition from the mainframe to the cloud is a ‘Herculean’ task, but with Astadia's FastTrack Factory and our technological experience, it can be implemented efficiently and effectively," says Dr Volker Fischer, General Manager of GFT Germany.

Migration ten times faster

Astadia FastTrack Factory offers a complete mainframe-to-cloud migration solution. It can reduce the duration of a typical migration project by up to 90 per cent. The platform covers a wide range of legacy technologies such as COBOL, Assembler, CA IDMS, Natural and ADABAS among others, which can be migrated to Java or C# in combination with all leading SQL databases.

With comprehensive and fully automated technology and decades of experience in mainframe transformation projects, GFT and Astadia enable clients to successfully migrate their applications and data to any public, private or hybrid cloud, then scale accordingly with a fully integrated and automated workflow that ensures business continuity whilst reducing the project’s risk, effort, and duration.