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Are you upgrading to CA Gen 7.6?

Making the decision of whether or not you should do the latest upgrade of CA Gen is not something done lightly or quickly.  Upgrading Gen has wide spread implications for IT staff, application users, and the business overall. Not upgrading also has widespread implications. Whether you decide to upgrade now, wait, or get out of Gen all together, there are many things to consider, of which we’re only going to highlight some of the main points here for your consideration in making this important decision.

Why upgrade?
CA announced it was discontinuing support for r7.0 last summer and has also announced that support for Release r7.5 is now scheduled to be discontinued as of December 31, 2008. Any previous releases have been out of support for some time now.  Although many CA Gen customers are currently on past releases, the current 7.6 release is significant because of the unusually long time frame it will be supported.  The CA Gen 7.6 release is likely to be supported until at least mid-2010 making this an excellent release to get current with.  Of course, it also has several significant benefits that make it a compelling upgrade as well:

• Database Schema Import Facility
• Cross Context Flows for Web Generation Clients
• Enhanced Diagram Trace Utility
• z/OS Dynamic program Call Compatibility Feature
• Support for Visual Studio .Net 2005, SQL Server 2005, and Windows Server 2003 R2
• Support for CA Datacom®/DB

What’s involved?
The CA Gen model driven development tool integrates across a number of third party hardware and software products, including operating systems, databases, compilers and communication protocols.  As a result of this, upgrading the CA Gen releases within an organization can be challenging.  An upgrade of CA Gen requires that several elements within the environment will also be potentially upgraded.  A CA Gen upgrade may include the IDE (Toolset), Encyclopedia, Communications and Build Tool.  The upgrade may require that the OS, DBMS, Compilers and/or Communication software be upgraded on multiple platforms (i.e. encyclopedia, toolsets and test through production servers) depending on how the tool is used within the organization.  As the CA Gen generated applications are upgraded, they must generally be regenerated and subsequently retested along with changing and retesting any customized user exits. 

Many of these upgrade related issues can be relatively straight forward for experienced CA Gen resources, but they require the various support resources with the organization to be able to allocate the necessary time to the project.  In other situations, the CA Gen resources may not have the current skills necessary to complete the upgrade.  For example, many of the CA Gen customers that currently use the mainframe as a server target may not have the experience with the new IBM LE environment on the platform to complete the upgrade.  There are many other unique issues at each CA Gen installation.

What if I don’t upgrade?
Choosing not to upgrade at this time may have no impact on your business today or even in three months, but you also need to consider the long term.  It is important to take into consideration how important your CA Gen applications are to your business.  CA Gen applications tend to be large unique custom mission critical customer applications.  Generally, these applications can not be down for an extended period of time, if it all.  CA vendor support is critical to the business for these applications. Also, 3rd Party vendor support also critical, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and so on.  How much risk can you afford to take with these applications?

Is there a way to minimize the risk?
There is no substitute for experience and a proven track record for this type of effort.  Having a team that is experienced in doing CA Gen upgrades with minimize the risks, shorten the amount of time the upgrade takes, and ultimately cost less.  Selecting to partner with a CA Gen expert for your upgrade will make all the difference. Did you know that QAT has been a part of more successful upgrades than any service provider in North America?  Partnering with QAT will give you the advantage of putting their lessons learned and experience gained in the areas of encyclopedia management, system architecture design, and upgrades to work for your business. They are also able to customize the approach to best fits your organizational, technical, and budgeting requirements and bring you up to r7.6 compliance. 
 
Conclusion
Now is the time to make a decision about whether you are going to upgrade now, wait, or get out of Gen all together.  If you find that you have more questions that you can answer in house, go straight to the experts at QAT to help you find the right path to take.

For more information, please visit http://www.qat.com/gen_ms_genupgrade.asp