[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[Bart Z. Lederman]

In article 
<b888d449-be8b-481f-907a-602f72f76784 at p27g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
 Eric Smith <serfsmith at gmail.com> wrote:

> So the writing appears to be on the wall, and after scouring the web
> and chatting to colleagues, I've finally been convinced that our large
> business-critical application currently running on OpenVMS (IA64) has
> to be moved to something that will be supported fifteen years down the
> line.
> 
> Since this is a niche community, I'm appealing to anyone in the know
> to find out who specialises in COBOL system migrations, specifically
> *from* OpenVMS, to any modern platform (interpretation: Windows or
> Linux)?  I'm looking for someone to come in and do the whole job and
> leave us with a system that behaves just as it did before.

I see to big problems here.

The first is, as others have noted, you probably won't get a commitment 
from any vendor that will say their product will still be supported 15 
years in the future.

The second is "leave us with a system that behaves just as it did 
before".  Do you have a complete document that says how the system 
behaves now?  Do you have a test suite that you can run on your current 
system so you will be able to test and know if the new system behaves 
the same way as the one you have now?

I'm not trying to be confrontational.  If you don't have a complete 
up-to-date accurate description of how the system works now, you will 
never be able to tell, in any reasonable time frame, if the new system 
is the same as the old one.  If you don't have a test suite, you won't 
be able to test the new system.

If you don't have these things, the first step is to create them.  In 
the process, you will obtain a much better idea of just what it is that 
your current system does.  You may (will probably) find that the system 
does more than you think it does, or that it does things differently 
than you think it does.  You will also have a much better idea of how 
big a job it's going to be to port the system, and what resources are 
going to be needed.

Bart.