Corporate Information

Information Analysis Incorporated (IAI)
11240 Waples Mill Road
Suite 201
Fairfax, VA 22030 USA
Phone: +1 703 383 3000
www.infoa.com

Contact Information

Charles Bunce
cbunce@infoa.com
Main: +1 410 461 2342
Alternate: +1 410 206 1565

Stan Reese
sreese@infoa.com
Main: +1 703 293 7935
Alternate: +1 703 888 6124

Information Analysis Inc. (IAI), a publicly traded Company (PTC) has successfully provided re-engineering, migration, and conversion services since 1979, utilizing an appropriate mix of automated tools and advanced techniques to effectively deliver legacy modernization, and legacy-to-web solutions. The company’s experience spans two decades of information technology evolution from mainframe-based applications, “4GL’s”, and hierarchical databases, through client/server and relational databases to the web and beyond. IAI’s use of automated tools, our own as well as recognized industry leaders (Micro Focus, Adobe), has proven to be invaluable in analyzing and processing source code to achieve optimal solutions. IAI’s Integrated Conversion Solutions (ICONS) technology has evolved from over 20 years of applied automated conversion technology experience. IAI provides complete, integrated modernization solutions.

U.S. Air Force
The U.S. Air Force Strategic Systems Group (SSG) of the AF Material Command operates several legacy systems providing mission critical functionality in support of the war fighter, including the Standard Material Accounting System (SMAS) and the Standard Base Supply System (SBSS). The legacy processing environment for these COBOL systems was a proprietary Unisys 2200 mainframe with a proprietary Unisys DMS 2200 database. On line programs were also using a proprietary Unisys screen handler. These systems are collectively comprised of approximately 3 million lines of code. The cost of operating these systems on the mainframe was very high and the legacy architecture was inconsistent with Air Force standards and SSG was seeking acceptable alternatives.

IAI was selected and engaged by SSG to provide our ICONS tools and expert consulting services to convert and rehost the SBSS and SMAS systems to operate, with critical functionality intact, on a Unix (Solaris) platform with an SQL (Oracle 9i) database and a J2EE user interface. IAI, working closely with Air Force technical staff, successfully achieved the required result, delivering the converted systems within an 18 month schedule. Particularly notable, among the successful conversion results, was IAI’s implementation of the IAI DBIO database access scheme whereby calls to the database were removed from the “inline” source code and implemented as a separate “database layer” providing important maintenance productivity gains as well as facilitating future system portability. The SSG was also able to realize a significant system performance improvement for the converted systems, over the original system performance, particularly in the batch processing components.

Rich Products (Rich Foods)
Rich Products, a major international food products company, headquartered in Buffalo, NY, decided to replace many of the existing mainframe legacy systems with an ERP solution running on a mid-tier (mixed Windows and HPUX) platform. After successfully implementing several ERP replacements for required functionality, Rich was down to a core group of legacy COBOL systems which could not be replaced with ERP and which were requiring that Rich maintain their expensive mainframe environment merely to host these “orphaned” systems. A primary complicating issue causing these systems to require a mainframe environment was that they had been constructed, and still resided in a proprietary, unsupported IBM legacy application generation tool called Development Management System (DMS). These systems also were the last systems utilizing the legacy DB2 database as the ERP implementation, and future Rich Products direction, was Oracle.

AI was selected and retained to utilize our ICONS tools and expert consulting services to convert the DMS/DB2 systems, comprised of approximately 2 million lines of code, to native, non-proprietary COBOL/CICS/BMS, and to rehost the applications on a Windows platform utilizing Micro Focus Enterprise Server and operating with the Oracle database.

IAI successfully delivered the converted and rehosted applications, achieving all required results, in a 6 month project which enabled Rich Products to remove the mainframe before the required renewal date and realize significant return on investment as well as achieving Rich objectives.