Total OpenVMS Solutions

Total OpenVMS Solutions

Sector7 is the clear choice for migrating your business-critical applications, consolidating your servers, and optimizing your IT. With extensive experience in OpenVMS, our team specializes in a variety of solutions tailored to meet your needs.

OpenVMS Application Management Services

Your business-critical applications are the very core of your organization. The need to respond to user requirements, implement new business functionality, and comply with new industry standards puts your IT resources under increasing pressure to provide 24x7 business support and enhanced business value in less time and for the same cost.

Increasing application complexity, higher maintenance costs, and dwindling OpenVMS skills merely serve as a distraction from the core functions of your IT department. You most likely have a list of “must-dos” that are essential to your needs in IT, while they do nothing to increase business value. Reliable configuration management is a good example of this.

By offering services that take responsibility for any or all aspects of the maintenance, enhancement, and evolution of your applications, we can help you meet and manage these challenges, allowing you to focus on the strategic business and technology initiatives needed to achieve your goals. These are offered within well-defined service levels to maximize cost savings, quality, and flexibility to your organization.

• Outsourced development and application maintenance
• Application development assistance
• Configuration management (source code control and build) implementation/clean-up and documentation
• Application and OpenVMS performance tuning
• RMS/database performance tuning
• System evaluation for regulation compliance/certification (ERES, HIPPA, etc.)
• Implementation/refresh of application testing procedures
  

OpenVMS Outsourced Services

Finding developers and systems people with OpenVMS skills is becoming increasingly difficult. Many professionals want to enhance their skill sets and move towards more lucrative employment in newer technologies, causing a shortage in OpenVMS expertise.

If you need to augment OpenVMS application development or system administration, or are having trouble finding someone with a specific set of OpenVMS skills, we offer professional, highly-skilled people to help. Not just another body shop, we retain only the best engineers and back them up with our promise of total satisfaction, maintaining contact throughout the engagement to ensure that the work goes well. Our offerings include:

• Remote system administration
• Creating/implementing recovery/redundancy plans
• System relocation planning and services
• Consolidating VAX systems onto Alpha
• Gap analysis study between current and potential applications (Oracle Financials, SAP, PeopleSoft, MANMAN)
• Application and server consolidation
  

Application Replacement

If your in-house applications were developed years ago because no off-the-shelf solutions were available, it may now be time to explore available options. Replacing your homegrown applications with a ready-made solution is often the quickest way to embrace new technologies and get the new features your business demands.

When replacing a homegrown application, the biggest barrier is understanding what the current system actually does. If the application has not been meticulously documented, the first task is to document the business functionality. This becomes the starting point for your gap analysis to determine if a replacement application meets all the necessary requirements. If the new application doesn’t at least meet the core functions of the current one, it represents a risk to your business.

Sector7 can help you evaluate alternatives, plan, budget, and execute the migration of automated business processes and data to an existing OpenVMS system or a new platform.

Porting and Migration

With frequent advances in computing technology, the need to renew, modify, and update computer systems is increasing. Application migration is a key issue in IT departments everywhere. Many organizations have developed applications for specific hardware and operating system environments, but those systems are becoming difficult and expensive to maintain. Migration allows these businesses to preserve their investments while benefiting from the latest advancements in technology.

Costs savings from migration are typically realized through reduced capital expenditures and operating costs from newer, more efficient hardware. Additionally, hardware standardization leads to highly competitive pricing. Enhanced capabilities also emerge from the availability of modern software development tools.

The introduction of new technologies such as the Internet, e-commerce, operating systems, networked data storage, and hardware systems has changed the concept of information usage in business. Staying up-to-date with these new technologies is essential for maintaining a competitive edge in today’s business environment.

While legacy systems often continue to meet functional requirements, it’s clear that maintaining them can be costly. The opportunity to retain valuable business logic from existing systems should not be overlooked.

Options for Porting and Migration

There are several migration options, depending on the existing environment:

• VAX VMS to VAX/Alpha OpenVMS
• Porting to OpenVMS on Itanium
• Migration to another platform

If your applications rely on OpenVMS features, migration to another platform may initially seem challenging, but Sector7 has extensive experience in this area. Our comprehensive suite of tools can minimize migration time and risks, while ensuring compatibility across different platforms.

If you prefer a non-tool-based solution, we can accommodate that as well. Our offerings include:

• Code clean pre-prep for migration on OpenVMS
• Tools-based migration
• Native migration
  

Migration Kick-Start

If you wish to perform your own migration using our tools, the Migration Kick-Start package provides the expertise needed in a single, affordable package. Available in three options:

• At your site, with your staff trained on your systems
• Your staff at our location using our porting center systems
• Your staff at your site using our systems via a secure VPN connection
  

OpenVMS Skills Transition

We also offer tailored transition training to migrate the skills of your OpenVMS engineers to your new platform. This helps ensure that your team remains effective and efficient after the migration.

RMS/Database Migration/Conversion

Data is your most valuable asset. If you need to share OpenVMS-based data with applications on another platform, or have it converted into another format, we have tools that can help with RMS/database migration and conversion.

Other Services

We offer a range of additional services to assist with your migration needs:

• 32-bit to 64-bit empowerment
• HP e3000 to Linux/UNIX and iSeries
• PDP-11 RSTS/E, RSX, RT-11 to Linux/UNIX
• UNIX to S/390 (OS/390 and USS & LINUX)
• Linux/UNIX to Windows®
• UNIX to Linux/UNIX
• Windows® to Linux/UNIX
• IBM/Amdahl mainframe to Linux/UNIX
• Legacy COBOL conversion/migration
• Database migrations (Oracle/Sybase/Rdb/DB2)
• Complex legacy systems to the platform of choice