Case Study: Note migration in financial sector

The Client

The client is a global world class bank. The Bank competes to be the leading global provider of financial solutions, creating lasting value for their clients, their shareholders, their people and the communities in which we operate.

Business Needs

The Client had been using Lotus Notes over 15 years for 2 main purposes: messaging and application platform. However the Lotus Notes based systems’ disadvantages started to outweigh their advantages:  high maintenance cost and inflexibility. Thus the entire legacy applications and data were to be migrated to a more modern platform and the targeted destination would be Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), Java, J2EE, .NET and open source technologies (a combination of Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and PHP). The target platform for each migrated application was determined by Client’s Program Management Office (“PMO”).

Challenges

This project had been expected to make an enormous impact on the Client’s internal system, and the team members had to take into consideration the influence on thousands of users worldwide. Change management had to be thoroughly planned and users had to be carefully trained of these changes to optimize the team’s support during migration.

Solutions

FPT analyzed the legacy system and suggested:

  •  Some existing Lotus Notes applications needed to be consolidated from several applications and treated as one migrated application. FPT will clearly state the benefits and drawbacks of all consolidation opportunities to enable The Client to make informed decisions for application consolidations. FPT will identify as many consolidation opportunities as can be identified. FPT will clearly state the complexity of the migrated application and this application will only count as one application of the designated complexity regardless of the number of source applications consolidated into each migrated application.
  • Some existing Lotus Notes applications which served no further future business purpose and are therefore targeted for archival as determined by The Client, will not be migrated. The PMO would define criteria for the applications which were to be removed/retired by their Application Development and Support Teams. FPT would identify these archival applications and databases as part of further detailed assessment, where the Client would then select archival or migration for the applications.

Once FPT and the Client’s PMO had agreed on the categorization of the applications, the implementation phase was carried out:

  • Development would be based on pre-defined solutions/designs created by FPT’s architecture team and approved by The Client’s architecture team;
    FPT’s Citus™ Migration Suite supported the data migration process (with the approval from Microsoft);
  • The project team worked in factory delivery model with clear roles & responsibilities, to optimize migration task force; retain and centralize knowledge;
  • Management Dash Board was utilized to monitor the change, early detection of critical issues, standardized communication channel;
  • The project team provided user acceptance support, deployment support and production support for the Client’s over 20,000 users worldwide.

Benefits

The new Microsoft-based system served to increase operational efficiencies and supportability; simplify scaling and expanding; and improve the performance of data access and reporting by allowing ad hoc reporting, dashboards and improving architecture and data model.
Aside from FPT team members’ over 10 years of expertise, the utilization of Citus™ Migration Suite’s into the project has tremendously made the migration process much faster and more cost-efficient than it should have been. Both the project process and outcome have been a huge business success to the Client as they all help to optimize the internal system in a cost-effective manner.

Technologies Used

.NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008, Java J2EE, Oracle 11g, SharePoint 2010, Citus™ Migration Suite, Eclipse.