A Voyager Case Study: EoL CM400 to FileNet

The move from an end-of-life system to a modern, cloud-native solution comes with many benefits. Upgrading legacy systems comes hand-in-hand with a more efficient, effective approach to processes and functions, while saving on complexity and cost of operations. You can realise the full potential of your valuable business data through a move to a system that works best for your company.

MPS Voyager can assist clients in upgrading their systems from an end-of-life CM400 (otherwise known as VI400 or Content Manager for iSeries) to IBM FileNet. We will show you the tangible benefits through the journey of one of our clients from the insurance sector.

With MPS Voyager, data migration from an end-of-life system to a Cloud-based solution is easy and secure. You can move your valuable business data to a more advanced, modernised system reliably and simply.

A reason to start changing: Runaway costs with no upside

Let’s start with why our client transition to a cloud-native content manager, and why you should do the same.

Our client has been using a CM400 content manager since it was a modern top of the line system, but that was a more than a decade ago. Now this system is EOL or End of Life, meaning there are no new releases, no new features, barely any security patches, so overall your EOL system is not going anywhere. It may already be a compliance exception or out of compliance for this very reason.

As usually with EOL system’s there is only extended support available, which is always exponentially more expensive than support you would get to an active product. There are no plans for further product development or fixes. The outdated user interfaces (UI) and proprietary formats are here to stay; thus these systems face many serious limitations.

Maintenance is also exceedingly difficult, first, the older the system, the harder it is to find the right experts who can help you with it, as everyone is learning newer technologies and moving on. Thus, the few remaining professionals, can ask as much as they want to. This combined with the cost of extended support makes it very hard to justify the cost of continuous upgrades to the budget holders, as you are not actually getting any new functionality, just fixes and security patches, which help you stay compliant. If you end up skipping regular maintenance, it leads you into a vicious cycle of expensive major upgrades every few years.

If you skip on these major upgrades, you can find yourself in even hotter waters, as out of date EOL systems that are not regularly updated can become out of compliance as well. Non-compliance with the relevant regulations can result in severe consequences, such as fines.

Another problem when we talk about compliance with our clients running EOL systems is that new regulations relating especially to privacy, and personal data might require you to do things your EOL system is simply incapable. Let this be redaction of certain information, application or change of retention policies, proper access control and so on. Consequences on skipping these not only include the regulatory consequences but also civil litigation, settlement compensations, loss of prestige, credibility, and negative public image.

Our insurance client has caught on early and have had an up to date and well-kept CM400 system, however the cost of maintenance, and the lack of new functionality was enough of a drive to look for alternatives. Other than cost there were two motivating factors to move out: one was the companywide initiative to drive as many business applications to the cloud as possible – which of course also have a cost and complexity decreasing drive from the infrastructural side – and the second, an upcoming regulatory crackdown on a requirement relating to credit card records (PCI-DSS). This is when the client reached out to Multipass Asia for their expert advice.

Where to next? Minimizing cost, maximizing benefit: migrating to a containerized IBM FileNet with the help of MPS Voyager

If you’re working with an end-of-life legacy content manager, for example a CM400, you should consider migration to IBM FileNet for multiple reasons. A migration to FileNet offers:

• openly available expertise and documentation, no lock-in
• active product development, regulatory compliance
• cloud-native architecture and resources, containerized deployment
• cost savings on infrastructure, support, and maintenance

Our insurance client has also decided to take the move to FileNet on a containerized basis. This multinational insurance company has approximately 33 million customers, 80 million content objects (documents) in their EOL system which took up 40TB space. The data was migrated to a state-of-the-art cloud-native system using MPS Voyager in a way that has helped to optimise the activities of the business units too.

By migrating to FileNet, like them, you can enjoy zero downtime upgrades, a cloud-native business transformation and deployment automation.

Cloud service can be a solution to private cloud-native automation from inhomogeneous application servers to automated deployment and redeployment. This solution also provides continuous system upgrades, containerised workloads, and improved protection of data and records.

Let’s see why they used MPS Voyager to accomplish the migration. MPS Voyager is an ECM ETL (Enterprise Content Management, extract, transform, load) toolkit that has connectors to work with legacy systems and the most modern cloud-based applications too. This toolkit is an integration platform that can migrate data in any heterogeneous IT environment and the existing set of connectors also mean instant integration with all supported systems without having to do custom development.

You can use MPS Voyager to move your data and processes to an IBM FileNet, IBM Business Automation Workflow (BAW), IBM Cloud Pak for Automation (CP4A) and many more. It is also useful in cases like cloud-native transformation or containerisation.

MPS Voyager offers specialised migrations and can aid with content filtering and transformation. An example of this is on-the-fly PCI-DSS redaction and transforming legacy formats into open archival standard formats which are both functions that were a must to our client.

You can use MPS Voyager to integrate or synchronize any ECM system or database, clean up business data and mitigate security risks. It also boasts Enterprise Content Governance. This means it can remove duplicates and non-business content, archive outdated data, and fix damaged data.

Conclusion: Just do it! Seriously, get in touch today.

The benefits are clear: significant cost savings, simplified architecture, diminished operation and infrastructure risks, better SLAs with virtually no down time upgrades and deployments. All readable data successfully migrated and if necessary redacted on the fly, duplicates filtered, business data cleansed.

MPS offers just such specialised migrations with MPS Voyager. MPS optimises the process to suit your business needs, as opposed to working with a blanket solution. Get in touch today!