Case 03
Legacy Platform Decommissioning
Multinational mining and energy group
A 30-year mainframe retired. Full auditability. Zero post-load corrections.
- Years of history migrated
- 30
- Post-load corrections
- 0
- End-to-end traceability
- Audited
A multinational mining and energy group needed to retire an IBM Adabas mainframe that had carried its financial and stock history for 30 years. Ixia migrated the critical data into SAP with full validation and audit traceability, and the platform was switched off.
Challenge
- Three decades of financial and stock history sat in IBM Adabas structures that predate relational conventions.
- The data had to land in SAP in a form auditors could trace, because once the mainframe was retired there would be no source to go back to.
Scale
- 30 years of accumulated financial and stock records.
- A business-critical platform with no parallel-run safety net after decommissioning.
Ixia's role
- Extraction design from Adabas structures into workable relational form.
- Transformation into SAP financial and stock models with full lineage.
- Validation, reconciliation and the audit evidence pack for sign-off.
Engineering approach
- Structure-by-structure mapping from inverted-list mainframe records to SAP models.
- Iterative validation runs comparing value-level results, not just record counts.
- Audit trail generated as part of the load itself, not reconstructed afterwards.
What made it difficult
- Decommissioning is one-way. After switch-off, every unanswered question about the data becomes permanent.
- Financial history demanded evidence-grade reconciliation, to the value, across 30 years.
- Mainframe structures encoded decades of business change that had to be interpreted, not just converted.
Outcome
- Critical financial and stock data live in SAP with full validation and audit traceability.
- Zero post-load corrections required.
- The 30-year platform was decommissioned.
Delivery lessons
- Decommissioning is a data-evidence exercise wearing a migration costume.
- Validate against business meaning. Record counts reconcile long before the numbers do.
- Audit trail design starts before extraction, or it never truly exists.
Technologies
- IBM Adabas
- SAP
- SQL-based ETL
- Reconciliation and audit reporting
“They took on the data everyone else was afraid to touch, and nailed it.”
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