CHALLENGE

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Lifetouch, the largest employee-owned photography company in the world with revenue of more than $1 Billion, was running their enterprise applications for two major divisions on aging hardware platforms.  The hardware was fast becoming obsolete, reaching the point of its end of support lifeline. 

Lifetouch was contracting with a third party for both hardware and operating system (OS) support – this 3rd party was being challenged to find parts as well as OS expertise.  The application software was written in an unsupported version of a 4th generation language, with major integration to the OS.  LCI was asked to analyze the overall environment and then to provide and execute a plan to migrate these applications to a modern, supportable platform. 

 

APPROACH

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LCI lead an effort to analyze the application environment in detail and develop a migration plan.  The migration plan included investigating and recommending a target platform of Windows Server 2008 running in a virtual machine environment. LCI also analyzed 4GL upgrade options (including version and costs), and ancillary 3rd party software versions and costs.

LCI worked closely with several Lifetouch groups needed for the conversion, testing, and implementation of Windows 2008.  LCI needed to work with the appropriate groups to understand the application interfaces to applications on various other platforms, and how to implement those interfaces on the new platform as well.

 

RESULTS

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LCI successfully led the effort to migrate both applications to Windows 2008 thereby reducing both hardware and OS support costs by nearly 50 percent . The new platform ensured that the applications will be viable far into the future.  While changing the business logic or processing logic was outside of the scope of this migration, Lifetouch asked LCI if they could speed up some critical weekly and monthly processes.  LCI rewrote those processes, cutting run times from hours to minutes.