The Legacy Modernization team recently chalked up another significant win with Crystal Cruises. The company was facing the end of support for VSE product from IBM and would have been looking at expensive hardware and software upgrades if they stayed on the mainframe. Fujitsu stepped in and offered its legacy modernization suite of products. By employing the Fujitsu suite, Crystal Cruises was able to leverage its legacy COBOL applications while moving them to the modern Microsoft .NET environment. This has endowed them with more IT flexibility, increased their business agility and saved extensively on costs. 

Boban Dragojlovic, Vice President of Computer Services at Crystal Cruises, commented, “Besides making excellent cost savings, our long term goal in moving to the .NET environment is to be able to transition our applications to a traditional .NET Web page/VB/SQL model. From the start I could see that the concept of migrating applications from our on-board and home office mainframes made sense, and I have been very pleased with how Fujitsu has helped me deal with areas of concern, including releasing support for TD Queue triggers just when we needed it! The performance of the latest release of NeoKicks has also been excellent with one of our end-of-cruise jobs going from 50-60 minutes to 80 seconds – and that’s just on my desktop!” On NeoBatch, Dragojlovic adds, “NeoBatch was already working very well for Crystal Cruises. Most of the new features target larger installations. The new feature that was a real boon for us was exposing all the JCL attributes to the custom print handler. Now every bit of batch output is passed through a custom printer handler which we wrote so we were able to go entirely paperless.”