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BluePhoenix and Police Mutual Partner to Create Services for Police Families
[January 31, 2013]

BluePhoenix and Police Mutual Partner to Create Services for Police Families


Jan 31, 2013 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- BluePhoenix, a provider of legacy language and database translation, announced the completion of a project that will begin to help over 200,000 police officers receive savings, investments and insurance services quicker.



According to a release, Police Mutual Assurance Society (PMAS), founded in 1922, offers financial help, an advice service, and a range of exclusive products designed especially for the members of the UK Police services and their families. The company provides prompt service while leveraging people and technology to best understand the needs of police officers and their families.

PMAS was using a DEC-Alpha (Open VMS) environment to handle critical customer information and share data between different financial platforms. This environment and its surrounding systems became increasingly difficult to support and often lacked the ability to integrate modern systems used to gain insight from customer data.


BluePhoenix noted that its technology and services were used to migrate the legacy language and database from Natural/ADABAS to a new environment leveraging Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise, Windows Server, Visual Studio and Hyper-V.

David Loughenbury, CIO of Police Mutual, acknowledged the business benefits of moving to the new platform. "The old platform required significant manual work to export data and had no rules or intelligence for automation. The new platform allows us to process and share data between business groups quicker with less risk. This project is the first phase of modernizing our overall infrastructure, reducing operating costs and adding integration with products like Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Now, our services and marketing teams can leverage data to do what we do best- know our customers and their needs." The year-long project translating over 1 million lines of Natural and Adabas data was not without its challenges. "The DEC-Alpha environment came with issues like file versioning and dynamically submitted Natural code for the DCL. Luckily, the source environment is ASCII like Windows so we were able to minimize codepage challenges," says John Regan, VP of Delivery at BluePhoenix.

Adds Loughenbury, "We knew there would be some difficulty with the legacy environment, but we selected BluePhoenix because of their significant experience, proven tools and on-shore support. BluePhoenix has worked closely and reliably with our teams from the inception of the project through the sizing and planning, right through to the delivery. The project has been completed within timescale and budget and this enables us to move onto the next stage of our IT strategy. The services provided by BluePhoenix really accelerated the migration timeframe and de-risked delivery." "PMAS is undertaking a project of great scale," says Matt Bell, CEO of BluePhoenix. "We were happy to work with their team and help reduce the risk around delivery of these services." More Information: bphx.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected]))

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