As a leading global fleet management company, Element provides a comprehensive range of fleet services that span the total fleet lifecycle, helping customers optimize their strategies at every stage – from acquisition and financing to program management and vehicle remarketing. These services, together with exceptional tools, technologies and consulting, empower customers to realize extraordinary results.
Business Background
Element Fleet Management has over one million vehicles under management, and serves more than 2,800 customers. The company employs over 2,700 staff members across 12 offices. Transaction sizes range from $500,000 to $40 million. 50 countries are served through the Element-Arval Global Alliance. Top industries served by Element Fleet Management are agriculture, business services, chemical, construction, consumer products, education and non-profit, energy, food and beverage, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and healthcare, professional services, telecommunications, transportation, and utilities.
Business Issue
Much of Element’s mission critical mainframe data is stored in a legacy IBM mainframe database. The cost to maintain these legacy databases is high and they lack the features required for modernizing the data architecture. The data is utilized by an extensive number of interlinked programs dependent on this legacy data. Element required a solution that would allow the legacy environment to continue while having real time replicated data on a modern database/platform. This enables them to utilize modern programing and data tools to be competitive in their market.
Technology Solution
Treehouse software and the customer developed a phased plan to prove out and implement tcVISION. This started with a proof-of-concept to prove out the technology’s effectiveness and technical suitability. This was proceeded by architectural phase to define the architectural solution including, configuration management, environments and promotion, high availability, security, disaster recovery, monitoring, operations procedures, script customization, data replication mapping and training plans. After defining the architecture, the production deployment phase started with incremental sprint-like deployments. Additional files were deployed into production every few weeks.
This project enabled the tcVISION product to synchronize mission critical financial IBM mainframe Datacom data to a modern PostgreSQL database. Bi-directional, real-time data synchronization enables changes on either platform to be reflected on the other platform (e.g., a change to a PostgreSQL table is reflected on mainframe Datacom). This allows their business to modernize the application on PostgreSQL without disrupting the existing critical work on the legacy system.
NOTE: Many modern tools are using the PostgreSQL database, which greatly enhances business agility (e.g., other divisions within Element are already using Amazon Web Services (AWS), so having tcVISION in place now makes mainframe data delivery to the AWS cloud an easy option). See a step-by-step video of Mainframe-to-PostgreSQL on AWS here.
Successful, real-time mainframe data replication to an open systems application allows web and mobile access and updates. Element indicated their satisfaction with the results and the solution, especially reduced mainframe MIPS costs, and enhanced business ability to respond to business environment changes.
Find out more about tcVISION — Enterprise ETL and Real-Time Data Replication Through Change Data Capture
tcVISION supports a vast array of integration scenarios throughout the enterprise, providing easy and fast data migration for mainframe application modernization projects and enabling bi-directional data replication between mainframe, Linux, Unix and Windows platforms. This innovative technology offers comprehensive abilities to identify and capture changes occurring in mainframe and relational databases, then publish the required information to an impressive variety of targets, both on-premise and Cloud-based.
tcVISION acquires data in bulk or via change data capture methods, including in real time, from virtually any IBM mainframe data source (Software AG Adabas, IBM Db2, IBM VSAM, IBM IMS/DB, CA IDMS, CA Datacom, even sequential files), and transform and deliver to virtually any target. In addition, the same product can extract and replicate data from a variety of non-mainframe sources, including PostgreSQL, Adabas LUW, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2 LUW and Db2 BLU, and IBM Informix.
Visit the Treehouse Software website for more information on tcVISION, or contact us to discuss your needs.
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