Enhance Your Credibility with the Business: Protect Mission-Critical Mainframe Applications

Enhance Your Credibility with the Business: Protect Mission-Critical Mainframe Applications

The Challenge

Like many other large companies, our client relies on a zSeries-based infrastructure to execute their core business applications.  In this case, these applications are IMS and CICS-based.  As with other companies, our client struggled to attract mainframe skills to remote areas.  With retirements within their core technical towers on the horizon, the client sought to mitigate this threat to their operations via a Managed Service solution from a partner that would step up to their stringent requirements.

The Solution

GTSG Managed Services provides:

  1. CICS and IMS support in a 24×7 model with complete ownership of the CICS/IMS infrastructure.
  2. A formal three-month transition during which the client provided Knowledge Transfer to GTSG resources for purposes of assuming ownership of the environment.
  3. Technical leadership and trusted advisor roles for IMS and CICS.
  4. Stringent Service Level Agreements backed by financial penalties for SLA misses.
  5. A Duty Manager for problem escalation through 800 number services.

GTSG Team Composition

  1. Transition & Knowledge Transfer Lead: Technical PM with overall coordination responsibility for the Transition and Knowledge Transfer effort.
  2. IMS and CICS Subject Matter Experts: Four technical resources, each with 25 – 30 years of experience. Two primary resources for each tower, two backup resources for each tower.  Primary and backup resources alternate coverage windows.
  3. Technical Duty Manager/Oversight: Technical experts with the ability to interact with the client and other GTSG SMEs in critical situations.

Client Benefits

As a result of these services our client realized:

  1. A successful Transition and Knowledge Transfer to GTSG resources.
  2. Enhanced credibility with the business: their core mainframe applications would continue to be supported into the future, easing concerns that applications would require migration to other platforms.
  3. A cost-neutral solution that provided skills, adherence to process, and scalability that matches the internal solution.
  4. A foundation for the migration of other mainframe and server platform services to GTSG using this Managed Service model.