Customer Testimonials
Discover how Orange, HSBC, iMSA, and URSSAF have modernized, secured, and accelerated their critical systems using ARCAD Software’s automation, DevOps, and data anonymization solutions.
Orange : Synon Exit & Modernization
In 2019, Orange needed to modernize DISE, its mobile billing application developed in Synon 4GL, due to a shortage of expertise and evolving market demands — including the arrival of 5G.
“The digital transformation of our critical applications with ARCAD Software was a decisive step to ensure the sustainability and performance of our billing system in the face of 5G challenges.”
The Challenge: Maintaining a Competitive Advantage
Replacing DISE with a standard off-the-shelf solution was quickly ruled out. The application’s business-specific rules provided a competitive edge that no packaged software could match. As for a complete rewrite, it was considered too costly and risky. The team needed a solution that would modernize DISE while preserving its strategic value.
The Solution: Automating the Conversion with ARCAD Software
To meet the challenge, the team chose to automate the conversion of Synon 4GL code into modern RPG Free Form using ARCAD Software’s Transformer tool. This approach enabled Orange to adopt a modern syntax while leveraging tight integration with IBM i and IBM® Db2® for i, delivering better performance and reliability than alternative languages like Java.
Beyond code conversion, the team also implemented a complete DevSecOps toolchain (GitLab, Jira, ARCAD, DROPS) to manage code and testing within an agile and secure environment.
Key Results
A Successful Modernization
The automated conversion allowed Orange to modernize the DISE application while ensuring uninterrupted service continuity. The new system is now fully operational in production and has delivered significant performance gains. Thanks to ARCAD Verifier, the team automated non-regression testing and rapidly detected any anomalies, ensuring the modernized application behaved exactly as before.
HSBC: Adopting ARCAD for DevOps
HSBC, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, decided in 2014 to implement a DevOps approach within its core banking services. The goal was to automate and improve lifecycle management for banking services, particularly in development, build, and deployment. To achieve this, HSBC sought tools capable of meeting its integration and automation needs.
“Adopting the ARCAD for DevOps solution at HSBC has transformed our development process, enabling significant productivity gains and agile implementation at a global scale.” Subir Sen, Head of Tooling & Automation – Core Banking Service Line / Global Practice Head – iSeries CoP
The Challenge: Optimizing Development and Deployment
HSBC’s team began working with RTC (Rational Team Concert) and RDI (Rational Developer for i) to manage the development workflow. However, they lacked a solution to fully automate the build and deployment processes, two crucial steps for increasing DevOps efficiency. After evaluating several options, HSBC selected ARCAD Software, a French-based company, for its unique ability to seamlessly integrate with these tools while delivering advanced automation capabilities for IBM i.
The Solution: ARCAD Software for DevOps
ARCAD Software provided HSBC with an Eclipse-based suite of tools, offering native integration with RTC and RDI. This integration allowed HSBC to perform automated builds, packaging, and deployments, all without disrupting developers’ existing work environments.
The adoption of ARCAD’s solution marked a significant milestone in HSBC’s DevOps and agile transformation. What began as a project focused on process automation has since evolved into a full implementation of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) — core principles of DevOps.
Key results
Conclusion
Today, HSBC has expanded the use of DevOps with ARCAD Software to multiple sites, with more than 40 additional deployments planned. This transformation enables HSBC to run CI/CD pipelines on IBM i, a milestone achieved by very few organizations worldwide. HSBC is proud of its achievements and continues to advance on its journey toward maximum efficiency through automation and agility.
iMSA: Accelerating and Securing Deployments with DROPS
iMSA, the technology arm of MSA (France’s agricultural social security system), manages the information systems for a regime covering over 5 million beneficiaries. Faced with a heterogeneous infrastructure combining legacy technologies and cloud-based solutions, iMSA launched a complete overhaul of its deployment pipeline. The goal: to replace an internal system based on shell scripts and Cobol code with a modern solution capable of accelerating delivery, ensuring full traceability, and meeting increasing demands for agility and compliance.
“With DROPS, we drastically reduced deployment times while improving quality and traceability — a key driver in our transition to more agile practices.” – Christophe Maugrion, Directeur Technique chez iMSA
The Challenge: Standardize, Automate, and Secure
The iMSA teams faced several challenges: centralizing deployments across more than 235 environments, ensuring strict traceability in a highly regulated context, integrating emerging technologies such as Kubernetes, Cloud, and GitOps, while supporting the adoption of agile methodologies like SAFe.
A rigorous selection process was launched to identify the most suitable solution, ultimately leading to the choice of DROPS, the deployment automation solution offered by ARCAD Software.
The Solution: DROPS, Combining Flexibility and Open Integration
DROPS stood out for its ability to manage heterogeneous Cobol and Java environments, centralize deployment processes, and meet specific requirements in terms of integration, user experience, and openness (with an open-source orientation).
Implementation was carried out gradually, starting with targeted use cases across three technology streams and three business teams. This controlled prototyping approach enabled rapid and confident adoption by internal teams, who were trained to become fully autonomous in using DROPS.
Key Results
Conclusion
Today, iMSA is continuing to roll out DROPS across all its systems, with a clear objective: to standardize deployment processes in order to maximize productivity and security, while supporting its long-term digital transformation.
URSSAF : Anonymisation de masse avec DOT Anonymizer
As part of our regulatory obligations, we had to anonymize a massive volume of Déclarations Sociales Nominatives (DSN), while ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive data.
- Our objective had two main components:
- A 5-year historical dataset to reprocess, representing 2.5 million DSNs × 2 per month
- A real-time daily flow, with 3 parallel streams, totaling up to 7.5 million files per month
We faced particularly high volume peaks:
- 1st to 5th of the month: up to 300,000 DSNs/day
- 6th to 15th: up to 700,000 DSNs/day
- 16th to end of month: around 10,000 DSNs/day
“DOT Anonymizer has become a true performance catalyst in our sensitive data management strategy.”
The Challenge
We were facing a major challenge:
- Processing extremely large volumes within tight time constraints
- Meeting a target of no more than 18 hours to anonymize 1 million files, in order to maintain integration with our global processes
- Dealing with highly variable file sizes
- Preserving the consistency of correlated data while ensuring full anonymization
- Operating in a standard, non-optimized, single-machine environment
The Solution : DOT Anonymizer
DOT Anonymizer turned this challenge into a success through a highly efficient technical approach and close collaboration:
- End-to-end algorithmic optimization:
- Drastically reduced file access
- Single-pass anonymization to maximize performance
- Intelligent multithreading, tailored to our data flows and infrastructure
- Strategic task reorganization with finely tuned sequential and parallel processing
- A paradigm shift in XML parsing, adopting faster and lighter pull parsing
Key Results
Conclusion
DOT Anonymizer has proven to be a true performance catalyst in our sensitive data management strategy.
We were impressed by:
- The power and flexibility of the tool, able to scale without compromise
- The responsiveness and attentiveness of the vendor team, who adapted to our specific constraints
- The speed of implementation — a complex project successfully delivered in just 3 months
An effective partnership, a proven solution, and results that lived up to our expectations