CASE STUDY

How Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water retired big iron in under 4 months

Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water is the sixth-largest of the ten regulated water and sewerage companies in England and Wales. Regulatory requirements mandated that at least seven years of customer billing data was to be archived and accessible at all times. As a result, three IDMSX databases containing all seven years of required historical billing data were left in place on the mainframe to meet the requirement, to be accessed as needed.

It became apparent that retaining the mainframe solely to hold and access archived billing data was not cost-effective. They needed a solution, fast. We converted the IDMSX databases to a single SQL Server database, refactored the applications used to access the data, and helped Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water shut their costly mainframe down for good in less than four months. This is the story of how it was done.

This case study covers the following:

• The factors driving Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water's decision to modernise
• Database modernisation best practices
• Snapshots of each project phase
• The shocking reduction in database & application footprint that resulted in the end