Enterprise Information System's Challenge
Fujitsu's Pricing and Support Provides an Attractive Alternative
Blazing Speed - a Welcome Bonus
The Fujitsu COBOL Experience
Terri Griffith, Project Lead for TOPS (Total Online Pricing System) in the Enterprise Information System's company of Lockheed Martin describes how TOPS has evolved:
"TOPS started in the early eighties on a UNIVAC system and was ported to IBM mainframes in the 83/84 timeframe - that's when I joined the project. It was always a total on-line system, with real-time processing - no batch. In the early 90's we rewrote the system to work from logic files so that the users could configure all the important details themselves. This greatly reduced our maintenance workload, enabling us to focus on taking the system to new environments and introducing new technologies.
"The first PC version was created in 1992 on Windows 3.1 and was later rewritten to take full advantage of the 32-bit environment available in Windows 95. We use C++ for the interfacing. We still maintain the mainframe system and, although there is no common code because of the different interfacing technologies, we keep the two systems functionally the same - in fact it's easy to move from one system to the other because the code is very similar.
"Our latest move has been to make the system fully network-compatible. One of the features we felt necessary when we did this was to support long filenames, including filenames that contain spaces."
This is where EIS ran into a problem. They needed more features than were available in their current release of software, and upgrading to another release was going to involve considerable expense for EIS.
Consequently EIS searched around on the Web and found Fujitsu COBOL. They bought a copy to evaluate and started to talk with Fujitsu's support staff.
Terri continues, "The development environment was definitely different from what we were used to, so we had the usual challenges in coping with change." However, Fujitsu's support staff answered EIS's questions in a timely and helpful manner, so that they were able to enjoy working in the development environment and came to appreciate its similarities to the C++ point-and-click look and feel.
The support for long filenames with spaces, introduced shortly after EIS started looking at Fujitsu COBOL, along with the pricing and professional support, would have been sufficient to persuade EIS to switch to Fujitsu COBOL. However, when they started testing the Fujitsu COBOL version of TOPS they found it ran in a third of the time! Terri commented that this was even faster than the normal mainframe execution times.
Another benefit, and possible contributing factor to the tremendous increase in speed, is that the indexed data files are much smaller. Fujitsu COBOL implements a true variable-length record, whereas EIS's earlier version used padded fixed-length records to support files containing variable-length records.
TOPS supports work in a time-critical environment so, although the previous performance was acceptable, the improved performance will give greater user-satisfaction as answers are provided in fewer stress-creating heartbeats!
Asked to comment on her overall experience with Fujitsu COBOL, Terri said, "I really appreciated the folks in support and, once I was over the initial learning experience, I really appreciated the point-and-click style of working."
