INDUSTRY

SAN FRANCISCO, SunNetwork(SM) 2002 Conference and Pavilion -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that a key business application for Transamerica Life Canada has been successfully migrated from a mainframe to the Sun Fire(TM) 6800 server using the Sun mainframe rehosting solutions. Completed on schedule in just 68 days, with the assistance of Sun Professional Services, the migration is expected to save Transamerica Life Canada more than 50 percent per year in mainframe system operations expenses and produce a return on investment within six months. In addition, the applications formerly running on the mainframe are performing 25 percent better on the Sun server. "When Transamerica Life Canada acquired NN Life Insurance in December 2000, a mainframe, outsourced through a U.S.-based service provider, was introduced into our IT environment; it was clear from the outset that this solution was not cost effective," said Naj Hirani, CIO for Transamerica Life Canada. "An in-depth evaluation of our options, which consisted of either bringing the mainframe in-house or migrating our applications to the Sun Solaris(TM) Operating Environment, revealed that working with Sun would allow us to realize significant savings, while improving our application performance. The results of the project to date have proven beyond any doubt that we made the right decision." That decision was driven by Transamerica's business objectives to ensure a lower total cost of ownership, improve system management and control and most importantly, minimize any risk to the business. Through the Sun(TM) ONE Mainframe Transaction Processing (MTP) and the Sun(TM) ONE Mainframe Batch Manager (MBM) software, Sun's mainframe rehosting solutions help enable customers to run existing mainframe CICS, COBOL and batch applications -- commonly found in commercial banking and insurance, manufacturing, retail and government -- virtually unmodified but in a contemporary computing environment. The cost-effective Sun Fire and Sun Enterprise(TM) servers, combined with Sun's mainframe rehosting software and Sun Professional Services' mainframe rehosting specialists, allow customers to maintain the skill sets of their IT staff, saving them considerable time and expense, while providing them with a strong alternative to their legacy mainframe infrastructures. To date, Sun has migrated more than 500,000,000 lines of COBOL code off the mainframe environment. With an aim toward educating companies that are considering rehosting projects, industry research firm IDC followed Transamerica's migration closely -- from the planning stages through product implementation and testing -- and is publishing three white papers detailing the progress. "We were impressed with Sun's ability to keep the project on schedule and were struck by how few problems were encountered during the course of a migration of this size," said Vernon Turner, group vice president, global enterprise server solutions for IDC. "When you consider the myriad issues involved with maintaining a mainframe in today's data centers -- from expenses in staffing and software licenses to the limited support for business critical applications -- it's clear that Sun's rehosting products and the expertise of Sun Services staff are critical to IT managers who want to keep pace in a modern, networked data center environment." For details of the Sun and Transamerica Life Canada migration project, please see the IDC white papers located at: http://www.sun.com/datacenter/mainframe/index.html.