THE MISSION

On March 10th, 2019, after more than 2 years of project duration and 60’000 hours of work, we managed to migrate Swisscom’s legacy Mainframe applications to the x86 cloud. Without recompilation of programs and without reformatting data. A worldwide first! We called the new platform „Mainframe as a Service“. MaaS is based on the Software Defined Mainframe from LzLabs and contains all server and services required to run native Mainframe applications in the Swisscom Enterprise Cloud.

The English expression 'When Pigs Fly' is used for something so unlikely, it's deemed impossible.

Impossible achieved.

THE Team

Christian

Solution Architect & More

Technical Lead, Creative Driving Force, Moral Backbone, Engineering Support

André

Team Leader & DB2/MW Engineer

Admin, DB and Middleware Engineering, DB Data Access/Replication, SymmetricDS, JDBC/ODBC

Chris

DB2 Engineer

DB/nonDB Data Migration, SDM Configuration, PROCLIB, Issue Tracking/Handling

Isabelle

DB2 Engineer

DB/nonDB Data Migration, SDM Configuration, PROCLIB, DB Administration

Robert

z/OS Middleware Engineer

SDM Engineering and Operation, Automation, App Dev Support, DB, IMS/DC, MQ, PLI, Java, Python, C/C++, ASM, Script, etc.

Jürgen

Linux Engineer

Linux Mentor, Automation Lead, OS/Base Engineering and Operation, Cloud, Network

Bernhard

z/OS System Engineer

SDM Engineering/Operation, Troubleshooting, Application Development Support, Cobol/Delta, Network/Firewall

Binia

z/OS System Engineer

SDM Automation/Operation, Monitoring, Reporting, HSM, SMF, Splunk/Dashboard, Joblog/Archive, eLearning

Philippe

z/OS Security Engineer

SDM/Linux Security Engineering and Operation, IAM, RACF, LDAP

Michael

DB2 Engineer

DB/Postgres Architecture and Engineering, DB Backup/Recovery, DB Automation, DB Healthcare

And many more ...

To achieve the impossible, more than 200 co-workers, contacts and stakeholders were involved into this project. Particularly the application testing team played a central role. Together with their buddies from LzLabs they ensured that the legacy Mainframe applications are running properly on the new MaaS platform. But also Job Management, Storage Management, Network and Cloud Team were essential, amongst all others. However, they are not all directly in scope of this website (see ABOUT).