Testimonies
Some customer feedback
on ISC services
The cartographic representation of application chains has always been a fundamental need for the production world. It provides operators with an overview to act quickly and comprehensively in case of an incident as well as in project mode.
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Eight years ago, the decision was made within the Operations department of Crédit Agricole Group Infrastructure Platform (CA-GIP), an entity of the Crédit Agricole group, to acquire a market-leading application mapping tool. We naturally turned to ISC and their retro-documentation product, iCAN.
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Satisfied with the product's capabilities, we have undertaken annual customization projects for the "client layer," which serves as the interface between the raw product and the users. The experience and efficiency of ISC's staff have enabled us to develop solutions tailored to the operators' expectations and constraints.
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Two of these successes include the creation of the METIER and DEX objects.
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The first allows users to calibrate their maps by including/excluding parts of their search scope at will. Like changing the lenses of a microscope, it allows users to switch from a general perspective to a very fine targeting of just a few processes. This flexibility is highly appreciated for managing local incidents as well as for reviewing generic processes.
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The second allows for this ergonomic and flexible navigation to be presented outside of iCAN, facilitating exchanges with non-operations teams. Over time, it has become the ideal response from the operator to any production request from the Development teams.
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The year 2023 was rich in developments, coupling the integration of the scheduler and application processes of the OPEN world (Windows, Unix, Linux) with the overhaul of the iCAN infrastructure on a Linux platform.
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The future is equally ambitious with the goal of eventually moving beyond the technological origins of application processes (mainframe or OPEN) to adopt a comprehensive banking business vision for our future deliverables.
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We know we can count on the responsiveness and expertise of ISC's staff to successfully carry out this project.
Antony LAMERE
Operations - Local Banking CASA
15th july 2024​
FNAC-DARTY
We carried out the ASG Cortex suite migration project (PDB, PREP and Plan) at the beginning of this year. We chose to switch to E-GEN and TWS because of the similar features. The project was launched at the beginning of 2020 with the objective of migrating at the end of August a scope of 3500 objects to be converted from PCL to JCL and from Plan to IWS.
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We achieved our objective thanks to a close collaboration between the FD and ISC teams despite the complicated confinement period. The ISC teams were attentive and very reactive to our different requests. One month before the deadline, thanks to their commitment, the project was completed on time and on budget and without any major incident on the day of the switchover.
David GUFFROY, Patrice ESCOFFIER and Fayçal ACHOUR-TANI
Director of Operations & IT
LA BANQUE POSTALE
At La Banque Postale, an internal project was led by ISC to implement E-GEN into the Research & Development teams, allowing them to design, create and test their JCLs while following our operational standards.
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Now, the Operation teams retrieve the deliveries of the Development teams in the same workflow within E-GEN and added the notion of scheduling and backup specific to the constraints of operations.
Subsequently, the sharing of a common repository and common rules has been improved with interactive HTML interfaces, offering to each actor a spatial and temporal view of every updates handled during the period of a change.
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These interfaces further facilitate the delivery and installation of E-GEN objects in all Tests & Production zOS partitions.
Jean-Paul DUCASSOU
IEP Service
Technical Department Offices
Director of Computer Production
SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE
The Staging solution is interesting compared to our previous mode of operation.
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Transition from a multi-server operation to a single server.
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Significant gains on the annual costs of the consumption of service batches, transformation of objects, and backups.
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Gains of disk space.
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Diminution of the administration effort.
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Reduction of the number of incidents.
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These gains allowed to achieve the ROI projected before the launch of the project, taking into account the cost of the Staging option and the 10 days of ISC assistance.
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To date, no issue to note since the implementation of the "Staged" Server. The interest of a solution allowing the delivery of JCL components from a source version in a life cycle is obvious to all.
The Staging allows us to serenely apprehend current projects and anticipate future ones.
Alain LENARTOWICZ
Resg/Gts/Rcr/Srf/Pla
BPCE IT
UNITED PROJECT
The technical context was the transposition of a BNPP application made of ZOS, CA-7, DB2 and CICS and already integrated in its own E-GEN, into a BPCE-IT environment where the tools, standards and operating rules were different.
Its target: an E-GEN specific to BPCE-IT where all components had to be integrated for future changes and deliveries. It was therefore necessary to offer a delivery tool incorporating our norms and standards. A delivery tool was also incorporated for program components arriving by package, in order to offer their management and integration according to adapted circuits and specific integration modalities.
We had several migrations to achieve in one go: the CA-7 scheduler to TWS, tools and utilities around DB2, file transfer products, standards transpositions and alert utilities.
Each migration / transposition required the formatting of multiple information transmitted in a raw way by BNPP, to understand the interactions. It is in this accompaniment that the ISC teams used iCAN and allowed us to study the different evolution needs that we were going to have to deal with. This method made it possible to transpose the CA-7 event-logic into the TWS plan-based scheduling, including dependencies and CA-7 frequencies into TWS planning.
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The readability of all this multiple and diverse information has been made possible thanks to iCAN and E-GEN.
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Transposition and formatting was done by a real ISC and BPCE-IT migration team who listened to each other, made sensible choices with great reactivity and strength of proposal.
At the end we obtained an E-GEN ready for use, a successful migration, having respected the planning and the planned budgets. An operational system that is robust and gives satisfaction to its users.
Pierre GENOUVRIER
System Expert
CTO - Infrastructure - Multiplatform Tools
ARKEA
At Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, we used E-GEN for JCL generation, according to internal standards, as well as the scheduler definitions. Until now, it was previously restricted to a service center that handled the change requests.
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In 2019, a project was put in place with the help of ISC to enhance the automatization of the mainframe batch processes. The objectives were to: streamline, standardize requests and improve the processing delay, which resulted in opening E-GEN to the all ISD developers.
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The project consisted of creating specific interfaces in E-GEN to meet the need of our developers, while maintaining control at the historical service center level. Furthermore, the opening of E-GEN has offered the developers the possibility to have access to the application repository in order to have a view of the existing process.
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In that respect, the adaptation possibilities and scalability of the product has met our expectations and have been quite satisfactory. Likewise, the ISC expert has been attentive, analytical and responsive throughout the project, working in unison, iteratively, with the project team.
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ISC was also able to integrate evolutions to suit our needs in their roadmap product.
In the end, we were able to develop, together, an application adapted to our process redesign and allowing a standardization of requests.
Fanch LUMINEAUX
DEXT - Project Office
BPCE IT
One BPCE-IT project in 2015 consisted of integrating into the E-GEN repository the definition and maintenance of Visual TOM scheduler applications.
This integration was initiated by collecting within iCAN the definitions of the other distributed schedulers of the group as part of migration batches.
This project started in July 2015 for ISC (commercial proposal). The developments started in January 2016 and ended in late June 2016, followed by the delivery in early July and the validation of the E-GEN / VTOM model.
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The official Go Live took place at the beginning of November 2016 for new projects, with the first three lots of SI Equinoxe and BPCE-SA being migrated in parallel, with the assistance of ISC until December 2016.
This project mobilized three ISC people (development) and one BPCE-IT person (E-GEN BPCE-IT administrator for the EQX and BPCE-SA IS).
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The results, in terms of functionality, use and rendering, were in line with our expectations:
A beautiful project was completed.
Anne FOURMONT
Expert Production
CTO and IT Equinoxe & BPCE
BNP PARIBAS
Our JCL & Scheduling integration project within E-GEN was completed in 2013.
Context: This project is part of the removal for obsolescence and dependency reasons of a house generator written in assembler and planning management outside the z / OS tool.
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The migration has allowed to bring new features and improve our operational efficiency:
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Reduced delivery times of environments.
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Facilitated the management of functional and documentary heritage.
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Cross references between components.
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Industrialised the creation of Run Books.
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Object lifecycle management: Staging and Archiving.
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Definition of the CA7 scheduling and the entirety of our JCL assets (69,000 jobs).
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In 2015, a new project was completed to extend the use of E-GEN to the Development population.
Objectives:
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To automatize the creation of the “Request for Change” document.
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To offer an access to the Production repository.
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To improve the visibility of releases to the ISD.
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To facilitate communication between the Development and Operation teams.
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To standardize the tests.
Stéphane BOUVIER
Application Asset Manager