With the recent announcement by Hewlett Packard of the "end of life" of the HPe3000, there has been considerable interest in tools to assist customers to migrate to other platforms.  SunGard Bi-Tech has a long history with just such a toolset, and this website was designed to give an overview of our product, TRANSPORT™, and links to our current distributors.

In 1988, SunGard Bi-Tech, realizing the growing UNIX marketplace, recognized the need for a product which would migrate COBOL applications developed on the HP3000 to the growing range of UNIX machines which were becoming available.  The resultant product, TRANSPORT™, offers the automated translation of Native MPE-based systems to the UNIX equivalent (notably the HP9000 HP-UX, the RS/6000 AIX, and Sun Solaris) with an application environment that mimics MPE. Currently TRANSPORT™ supports Oracle 8 and Informix 7+ on the the following platforms: HP9000 HP-UX, RS/6000 AIX, and Sun Solaris.

The design objectives of TRANSPORT™ were as follows:

• To develop a product which would migrate 100% of complex applications with a minimum of changes to the source application code.
• To create a production version of the application being migrated on the resultant UNIX platform which was functionally and cosmetically identical to the MPE-based version.

TRANSPORT™ will currently convert and transfer COBOL source code, copylibs, IMAGE schemas, IMAGE data and VPLUS Forms Files. Most MPE intrinsics have also been emulated.

The benefits of using TRANSPORT™ to migrate applications can be summarized as follows:

• The time and cost of redeveloping the application under UNIX accessing a RDB is significantly reduced.
• The resultant production UNIX version of the application simulates the MPE-based environment, hence removing the possibilities of product divergence.
• Additionally, End Users feel more “at home” due to the mimicking of MPE by TRANSPORT™ (thus reducing possible re-training costs).
• The costs of re-writing documentation and associated procedures are reduced as TRANSPORT™ emulates the MPE-based application functionality under UNIX.

Applications which have been migrated using TRANSPORT™ are now successfully installed both across the United States and Europe, with the companies who have taken this step realizing the benefits shown above. With the growing interest in TRANSPORT™ as a migration tool, Bi-Tech has and is continuing to appoint distributors around the world who can locally review and assess applications to be migrated.