Ceridian is a leader in managed business solutions for human resources and workplace effectiveness services and a business unit of Ceridian Corporation (NYSE: CEN). The company accounted for 74% of Ceridian Corporation’s revenue of $1.2 billion in 2000.

Ceridian (www.ceridian.com) provides a broad range of managed business solutions including human resources management, payroll, tax filing, application outsourcing, time and attendance, benefits administration, employee assistance programs and work-life services to employers of all sizes in the United States, Canada and Europe .

This story discusses Ceridian’s tax service, which has been a Taurus customer since 1989 and has used BridgeWare, a Taurus product, to help with a major migration.

The time was right to migrate. And running out.

According to Bob Lindblom, Ceridian’s Director of Product Development, several situations coincided to force the migration decision. “First, the scalability and performance of the existing application and its supporting system architecture limited the opportunity for growth. Next Y2K was coming. We had to be ready for that. But it was really day-to-day issues that had the most influence. Every year we kept running out of processing power, so we could not grow the business horizontally or vertically. We were constrained by the HP3000 hardware available from Hewlett-Packard and we wanted to take advantage of newer technologies. Going to the HP9000 and UX, gave us more options.”

The migration was going to be a big job. Ceridian was running four HP3000 boxes 
-- two in production, one development and one QA. The company used homegrown applications developed in Cobol and PowerHouse using the IMAGE database. Those would have to be ported or rewritten for the HP9000 along with much JCL.

More daunting, the information to be migrated resided in 206 different IMAGE datasets across 10 databases. Altogether, 400 million records totaling 38 GB had to be moved. 

Try it. Test it. Test it again.

The decision was made to run the HP3000s and HP9000s in parallel until the whole system was rock solid. Fortunately, Ceridian had systems in place that helped. 

According to Mr. Lindblom, “Our two production HP3000 boxes split the production load. We used one HP3000 to do all the batch processing. We shadowed that data to a second HP3000 box for our online users. . This setup allowed us to split the production workload and gave us local disaster recovery capabilities, as well.”

HP Consulting provided Ceridian with the blueprint for the migration: the architecture, how many machines would be needed, the porting methodologies that would be used and the costs in labor, subcontracting, hardware and software. The timeline was estimated to be 12 months and a substantial cost was to be incurred.

Not an IT project. A company effort.

Mr. Lindblom believed that assembling the right team was bigger than any technical problem. He said, “We started by identifying the people both in Ceridian and Hewlett-Packard who would need to be involved in the project. From the business side we knew we needed representatives from Customer Service, Tax Filing Operations, the Tax Agency Product Group, Finance, and other departments involved and assigned to this project. After all, 500 people business people access the system every day, and there were 112 IT staff.” 

The decision was made to re-host the HP3000 COBOL code on UX by subcontracting the port to i-Cube (later acquired by Razorfish). The placeholders to IMAGE DB calls were left in place but called Oracle procedures using C wrappers that inserted, updated and deleted data in Oracle rather than in IMAGE. These calls were accepted as inefficient but adequate on the HP9000 and are slowly being removed from the ported application over time. 

JCL was converted to UX shell scripts and the Powerhouse code was ported to run under Powerhouse for UX. Where the Cognos Inquizitive report writer had been used on the 3000, Business Objects was substituted , providing more flexible data analysis. 

During the test phase, data was mapped from the IMAGE databases to the Oracle data structure on the HP9000. BridgeWare was used to iteratively test bulk moves from the HP3000. Once the logic was proven, the logic for moving incremental HP3000 data changes was tested. 

All systems “go.” 

Once the test cycle was complete, Ceridian did the migration from 2nd August 1999 through 28th August. During this time, BridgeWare moved and kept in synch some 38 GB of critical data, moving up to 17 million records per hour. 

It all went flawlessly, according to Steve LeBlanc, who did most of the BridgeWare work, “Our reaction was kind of Wow! We did it! It actually worked. Our biggest fears didn't come to light.” 

Mr. LeBlanc says, “I thought BridgeWare worked very well. It was very easy to use. It was extremely reliable. I was very impressed with it.” 

However, the migration, although completely successful, did not go entirely to plan. The 12-month plan became 24 months and the cost over-run was substantial. 

"We carefully documented the lessons we learned", said Bob Lindblom. "While there are many technical obstacles that we might prepare for better next time, the key reason for success was our people. We had active and visible leadership by executive management; we dedicated teams to the project and then motivated and supported them to have a vested interest in project success. That generated perseverance, tenacity, and even stubbornness to the point that failure was simply not an option. That same attitude also allowed us to overcome various technical obstacles that we encountered". 

How do they come up with that stuff?

Mr. LeBlanc also offered some kind words for Taurus support: “We had more problems with dirty data than we anticipated. BridgeWare was a great help in scrubbing data. I mentioned to Vicky Shoemaker (Director of Customer Support at Taurus) that it would be nice if there were some way to prevent Oracle from crashing on invalid data items. The next thing I know, she gives me a new command that let me recover from an invalid item, and put it aside for later checking. That's what I mean by the support. It was beautiful.”

Oh, by the way, the job’s not done yet. Ceridian will soon begin migrating all of Ceridian’s remaining IMAGE-based business application off of the HP3000 platform. Once again they will use BridgeWare.