AUTOMOTIVE

Located in the Western part of Switzerland, Lausanne, "the smallest of large Swiss cities," is the capital of the Canton of Vaud and has been host to the International Olympic Committee since 1915. With 125,000 inhabitants and a dynamic industrial and economic environment, managing the City requires significant computer systems. Historically, the management of the City (population, companies, schools, voters lists, etc.) was performed on an IBM/390 mainframe. With these applications slowly growing obsolete, the City needed to replace its systems to maintain its business operations. The City selected a Java development architecture, using Open Source components such as Apache, JBoss and Eclipse, with Oracle on Linux as the RDBMS. Migrating from one system to the other, a process that the City expects to last for two to three years, results in some applications continuing to run on the mainframe, while other applications become available on the new systems. "There was no way we could just replace all our applications overnight," explained Guy Wuilleret, Director of Information Systems for the City of Lausanne. "We needed the ability to run both the old and the new system in parallel, while preserving the consistency of data in both systems for the entire duration of the migration." To address these needs, the IT teams of the City of Lausanne needed to identify a solution that would allow data to be replicated bi-directionally between the DB2/MVS database on the IBM mainframe and the Oracle RDBMS. "This replication carries two specific complexities," explains Angela Nani, Manager of Applications for the City of Lausanne. "Firstly, the data schemas differ vastly between the mainframe and the Oracle databases, which requires complex data transformations during the replication processes. More importantly, this replication needs to be performed in real-time, requiring updates to be processed in an incremental mode." After evaluating several solutions on the market, the City of Lausanne selected a joint solution provided by Sunopsis and Attunity. The data integration solution relied on the robust ETL capabilities of Sunopsis, while Attunity provided real-time access and change data capture for the City's mainframe data sources. The seamless integration between the companies' products simplified and accelerated the solution delivery. "We were impressed by the ease of installation and configuration of these products," explains Angela Nani. "All the tests we had designed to validate the solution were passed in a record time, when competing products were unable to meet our needs. We are glad that Sunopsis and Attunity have decided to work together to offer us an integrated and high performance solution."