Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

A year and a half ago, following a major acquisition, the IT manager at Liberty Northwest insurance company faced 1,000 users and a mess of different desktop operating systems and emulation programs. Employees at the Portland, Oregon, firm were using a range of thick-client emulators from Attachmate, Novell, Mochasoft, and NetManage. To simplify matters, the insurance conglomerate decided to standardize on Windows 2000 clients, running a single emulation program. But which one?

On January 1, 2002, Liberty Northwest acquired North Pacific insurance company and created one of the largest insurance carriers in the Northwest. With Liberty Insurance's specialty in worker's compensation insurance and North Pacific's property and casualty insurance business, the combined Liberty Northwest Insurance Corp today manages $300 million worth of insurance in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska.

As with any major merger or acquisition, there was a period of clean-up and consolidation that followed. Workers were uprooted, offices were merged, and entire data centers were moved. "It was a standard corporate merger," says Eric Peterson, Liberty Northwest's manager of IT infrastructure. "A typical collision, as I like to call them."

Peterson, who came from the Liberty Northwest side of the house, realized one of the most important tasks he would face in the consolidation phase didn't have to do with the System/36, AS/400, and mainframe servers that ran the company's core applications. While server consolidation is all the rage in corporate America these days, it wasn't a concern to Liberty Northwest. The worker's compensation application, which runs on an older AS/400 Model 510, and the mainframe property and casualty applications are both 20-year-old applications and they are stable.

Rather, the plethora of desktop operating systems and host access programs in use between the two companies would prove the biggest pain point. The company had Windows NT and Novell NetWare clients running on its employee's desktop PCs. Following a stock-taking period, Peterson was given nine months to execute the desktop consolidation plan. That would provide just enough time.

Peterson and his team considered their options. "We had a variety of application suites, and we were looking at any way we could simplify the desktops," he says. Liberty Northwest's IT staff had experience using NetManage's Rumba thick-client emulation software, and had even done some custom programming with NetManage's software development kit. Following a pre-sales meeting with NetManage representatives, Liberty Northwest was nearing its decision. "We were all thinking fat client at the time," Peterson says. "Then the guy from NetManage mentioned the Web-to-host product. I said, 'Everybody back to the table.'"

For some reason, Peterson and his staff hadn't considered the Web-to-host emulation model, where employees access their 5250 screens through a Web browser instead of a full PC application. The key advantage held in the Web-to-host model is central administration--an important factor to consider when dealing with 1,000 employees spread across five large Western states.

"We'd been stuck in this fat client mold," Peterson says. "We didn't see anything else out there. Maybe if we had done more due diligence, we'd had seen more products. But we only had nine months to complete this product. It was a solid, down and dirty, decent product. We had a history with Rumba. It wasn't too hard a decision."

From the employee's perspective, the actual rollout of Rumba Web-to-Host was anti-climactic. One Friday afternoon, the users shut down, and next Monday morning, they were logging onto their OS/400-based worker's compensation applications and their mainframe property and casualty insurance applications via the Rumba Web-to-Host product. "As far as the end user was concerned, there was no change in functionality--zero user downtime" Peterson says. "It was a challenge, but we made it."

The only cause for concern occurred with Liberty Northwest's thick-client homegrown claims application. "We had APIs, hooks into the Rumba fat client," Peterson says. "We had to get a new development kit for Web to host to rewrite that thick application. We're in the process of moving those users over."

Peterson says life is simpler now that he can administer the emulation software from a central location, instead of manually updating each desktop. "Now it doesn't cause me a massive headache every time we want to update the software or install a patch," he says. "That traditionally had been the problem with fat clients. Suzy on the fourth floor wants her keyboard mapping changed. Before, we had to install a config file. Now we can do it from the server."

This June, Peterson and his team completed the migration to Windows 2000 and NetManage's Rumba Web-to-Host product. With all the migration and consolidation complete, he's promised his staff smooth sailing through the rest of the summer. That is, until the company takes up its plans to implement OS/400 high availability and fail-over capacity. Then the fun starts all over again.