ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH modernizes mainframe development and testing

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ERGO is a major insurance company with premium income of €20 billion. Represented in more than 30 countries, ERGO focuses on Europe and Asia, and is one of the market leaders in all segments in its home market of Germany. More than 50,000 people work for the Group, either as salaried employees or as full-time self-employed insurance agents.

ERGO offers a broad range of insurance products and services. More than 40 million customers, of whom 20 million are based in Germany alone, place their trust in the security, expertise and support provided by ERGO and its experts in various lines of business.

ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH is ERGO’s IT Service Provider. It was found in 2000 and today has grown to become one of the biggest IT service providers in Germany, with approximately 1,500 employees across five locations. The IT systems managed by ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH process around 15 million online transactions per day, and the software landscape includes approximately 65,000 programs containing 65 million lines of code.

ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH develops and maintains a number of legacy COBOL applications that support the core insurance business applications on ERGO’s mainframe platform. The infrastructure is built on IBM System z servers, running IBM DB2^® and IBM Information Management System (IMS™) software.

ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH decided to adopt IBM Rational Developer for System z software to accelerate mainframe development, improve the efficiency of its COBOL development teams, and move to a GUI-based COBOL development environment that would enhance productivity.

Frank Dörich, Head of Development Tools and Application Security, explains: “We selected IBM Rational Developer for System z because we wanted to modernise our mainframe development processes and increase efficiency in the development of mainframe programs. Especially debugging and comparing programs is much more comfortable with the new solution than with ISPF.”

“Another goal was to make mainframe and COBOL development more attractive to younger programmers by introducing a more modern, intuitive user interface for our development environment. Eclipse is standards-based and shortens their learning curve significantly. A ‘green screen’ interface was not attractive to young people newly hired. They were accustomed to a GUI, to handling and functionality which is not possible in a 3270 based interface. Again, the flexibility of Rational Developer was a major advantage in meeting this objective.”

Modernising the development environment
While some programmers at ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH still use the IBM ISPF for z/OS^® tool-set to develop and document batch programs, the number of Rational Developer for System z users is permanently growing. They prefer to use modern GUI based development environment that fits into modern overall development architectures.

“Programmers who are using Rational Developer for System z have found that development is more comfortable than with our existing set of development tools,” says Dörich. “Debugging in particular is much faster. Features like syntax checking, content assist, comparing different file versions, multiple views and error identification make development easier. Checking code in and out, editing code, debugging code: the most important developer tasks now can be done within this modern graphical user interface under Eclipse.”

A customisable solution
ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH continuously adapts the Rational Developer for System z environment to meet its team’s specific needs. For example, it has been using the Common Access Repository Manager (CARMA) within Rational Developer for System z to establish interfaces with other software configuration managers (SCM).

“Using the CARMA interface, we can browse, edit, compare, check in and check out code directly from within Rational Developer for System z,” notes Dörich.

Increased development and testing efficiency
At ITERGO Informationstechnologie GmbH, Rational Developer for System z has helped improve development and testing efficiency for the company’s insurance systems and applications. Dörich explains: “The biggest advantage of Rational Developer for System z is the improvement of programmer’s productivity. In many cases, mainframe developers have been working without an IDE for a very long time – there have been few improvements to their development platform over the years. Of course, it takes people some time to get familiar with a new environment, but when they become familiar with Rational Developer for System z, we are seeing an increase in development efficiency.”