Here are a few examples of our success in transitioning legacy APL applications into the modern world:
• A Major U.S. Insurance Agency
• Financial Analysis Tool for a Major Global Bank

A Major U. S. Insurance Company

This project involved retiring an APL application that had been in use for about 25 years in the company’s auto insurance pricing division.

The original application provided a tool for the actuaries to analyze their premiums and expenses to produce a reasonable profit. There is a need to keep profits within regulations and to minimize loss to the company. The actuaries performed analysis by state and by territories within states. There were hundreds of millions of historical records dating back to the 1970s. The application used business rules that the company wished to maintain.

The original application was written in APL and ran on an IBM mainframe using a home grown VSAM database that was only accessible via APL. The application had evolved over the past 20 to 30 years and some of the code was very old and not documented.

The application did not fit into the standard IT procedures of the company such as configuration management and deployment procedures. The original source code to produce the VSAM processor had been lost and therefore was not available for modification. The experienced APL developers had left the company and only a few of the actuaries and some newly trained programmers were available to maintain or make changes to the code. Therefore, the decision was made to re-write the application as a desktop application using C# and SQL.

The company contracted with SmartArrays to assist, using our expertise in APL, VSAM and the array processing functionality to re-engineer the solution.

The new Auto Pricing Application was written in C#. SmartArrays participated in the requirements, design and development of a desktop C# application with its supporting SQL Server database. The new application was designed to allow the analysts to manage the domain values for the calculations: companies, locations, territories, risks and coverage, without the continued involvement of the IT department. With the new applications they would be able to experiment with rate changes, understand the implied Premium at Present Rates and finalize a rate change to become effective on a given date.

A major portion of the project involved moving the historical data to SQL and arranging the capture of the new data each quarter. The APL expertise of the SmartArrays consultant was extremely valuable for interpreting the rules that were applied to the VSAM database, for example a change that was made in 1994 to reflect a new law in Hawaii. While interpreting the VSAM database, our consultant developed an in-depth knowledge of the application and the business rules involved in the data base and the application.

The company decided to use new business rules for the new application, but our consultant’s knowledge allowed him to write the main computation for the new application with a strong understanding of the data and the impact of the new business rules.

In conclusion, the conversion was completed in ten months, and has been running in production ever since. APL systems have been retired. Users have the additional functionality, can change their analysis to meet their needs and now the application is in a form that is administered by IT and complies with company policy. The business manager responsible for the project said, “This is the way a project is supposed to go. We made a plan and a budget, then we finished the project on time and within budget.”

Financial Analysis Tool for a Major Global Bank

This project involved retiring an APL application that had been in use for about eight years in the bank’s corporate banking division. The original application, called the Analytics Utility, produced reports on the financial health of corporate clients for use by banking relationship managers. It integrated data from private disclosures and various third-party data feeds of public-company financials, such as Reuters, Thomson, CompuServe, etc. The application used user-written business rules to transform the data into a standardized chart of accounts and then generate a variety of analyses and peer-company reports.

The original application was written in APL and ran on the user’s desktop, using an APL database adapter to retrieve data from Oracle or SQL Server databases. Although well liked by the users, the tool ran counter to the security policies adopted by the bank in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Also, the bank had no APL developers remaining in its IT staff, and thus had to depend on an external consultant for maintenance.

As a result, the decision was made in 2005 to transition the Analytics Utility to a web-based application, replacing APL code with C# and .NET. The bank contracted with SmartArrays to assist, using our expertise in APL and the array processing functionality of the SmartArrays SDK to re-engineer the solution.

The new Analytics Utility was written in C# and ASP.NET. The functionality was separated into two parts – a lightweight web client for the user interface, and a powerful analytics and reporting web service that ran on a separate server. The web client was integrated into an internal application portal used by thousands of the bank's employees.

Development work was divided between the firm's own IT staff and one SmartArrays developer. Internal staff employees worked primarily on the user interface and portal integration, while the SmartArrays developer converted the data retrieval, transformation, calculation, and reporting functions and packaged them as an ASP.NET web service. SmartArrays technology was used for the array-processing functionality and to provide a high-performance database adapter and cache.

The new application used the same database as the original as its repository for source data and business rules, allowing it to run in parallel during the test period. All of the business rules and reports that the users had created in years of using the old APL application were preserved, making for an easy transition to the new platform and minimal retraining.

Replacing the analytical calculations with SQL stored procedures was considered. However, prior experience had shown that this would not work. The compute-intensive parts of the application would not have been fast enough in SQL, while SmartArrays was able to crunch the bulk data with ease. In addition, the users would have lost the ability to write their own business rules directly. Using SmartArrays for the “heavy lifting” part of the application provided excellent performance and the necessary flexibility, without imposing a computational burden on the database server.

The conversion was completed in six months, and has been running in production ever since. Users have the same functionality as before, but now in a form that is administered by IT and complies with company policy.