Author Description

Time to market, flexibility, and cost reduction are among the top concerns common to all IT executives. If significant resource investments are placed in mature systems, IT organizations need to balance old and new technology. Older technology, such as non-IBM pre-relational databases, is costly, inflexible, and non-standard. Users store their information on the mainframe and thus preserve the skills and qualities of service their business needs. But users also benefit from standards-based modernization by migrating to IBM® DB2® for z/OS®. With this migration, users deliver new application features quickly and respond to changing business requirements more effectively. When migrating, the main decision is choosing between conversion and re-engineering. Although the rewards associated with rebuilding mature applications are high, so are the risks and customers that are embarking on a migration need that migration done quickly. In this IBM Redbooks® publication, we examine how to best approach the migration process by evaluating the environment, assessing the application as a conversion candidate, and identifying suitable tools. This publication is intended for IT decision makers and database administrators who are considering migrating their information to a modern database management system.