Nonprofit Advocacy Organization Gains Efficiency, Scalability and Agility

Overview

One of the largest membership-based nonprofits in the world is well-known for empowering constituents through advocacy, information, and service. For decades, the organization has relied on robust mainframe systems to support its membership operations, benefits, and programs. With rising maintenance costs, impending skills shortages, and a strategic ambition to achieve greater agility and integration, the nonprofit partnered with Astadia to modernize their legacy IBM z/OS environment and migrate the organization’s core applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Challenge

The organization’s mainframe hosted a complex inventory of mission-critical applications, including over 1,500 COBOL programs operating alongside Easytrieve modules, Assembler programs, JCL jobs, Sapiens eMerge rulesets, and PROCs, with data stored in DB2 tables, VSAM files, GDG bases, and sequential files. These highly complex systems powered essential membership processing functions, but their agility and scalability were limited, operating expenses were increasing steadily, and a shrinking pool of specialized talent constrained the organization’s ability to innovate. Leaders at the organization wanted a modernization strategy that could provide functional equivalence, with minimal disruption to their operations. They also wanted to access key benefits of cloud computing, such as elasticity, cost optimization, and ease of integration.

The Solution

Leaders at the nonprofit selected Astadia to lead a comprehensive mainframe modernization project using its proven FastTrack Methodology and Migration Factory tools. Astadia's proven expertise and automation capabilities directly addressed the organization’s need for a low-risk, efficient transition from legacy IBM z/OS systems to AWS. Astadia's FastTrack methodology accelerates code refactoring, data migration, and testing processes with high precision, enabling faster timelines and predictable execution while minimizing business disruption.

Leaders at the nonprofit also valued Astadia's integration of agentic AI services (including GenAI-powered modernization agents), which enable automated analysis, documentation, and workflows. These capabilities enhance speed, reduce risk, and lay a foundation for future innovation in the cloud.

Key elements of the project include automated refactoring of COBOL, Easytrieve, and Assembler source code into modern Java applications, conversion of DB2 databases and VSAM files into PostgreSQL data models and structures, transformation of various mainframe files to ASCII equivalents, and migration of JCL batch jobs to Bash script equivalents. Astadia also migrated the organization’s Sapiens eMerge business rules to a distributed version compatible with AWS. Astadia's TestMatch and DataMatch accelerators enabled automated validation testing for functional equivalence across converted code, data, online transactions, and batch processes.

Following a series of assessments and discovery workshops, Astadia’s mainframe experts designed and planned a migration path, leveraging Astadia’s FastTrack Migration Factory and other proprietary Astadia technology. The team developed integration adaptations (security, scheduling, interfaces), test plans (unit, SIT, regression, performance, UAT), and knowledge transfer processes. They planned for extensive testing and validation, dress rehearsals, go-live coaching, and follow-up support. Astadia’s Migration Factory toolset enables automation at scale, ensuring predictable outcomes and freeing up key team members to focus on oversight.

The Results

Astadia successfully transformed approximately 3 million of lines of code and migrated vast volumes of data to a modern, cloud-native AWS environment, delivering functionally equivalent systems to support the organization’s uninterrupted operations. This modernization initiative delivers significant cost reduction to the nonprofit, along with improved scalability and elasticity. It also enhances the organization’s technical agility, enabling their IT team to accelerate the pace of innovation. The nonprofit can also enjoy the

benefits from access to cloud-native AWS analytics and AI. The project has laid a strong foundation for reduced long-term technical debt while maintaining uninterrupted support for the organization’s critical membership services.

This migration project demonstrates the benefits of Astadia's FastTrack approach, including for complex, large-scale mainframe modernization initiatives. The company’s Migration Factory tools – including CodeTurn, DataTurn, TestMatch, and DataMatch – enable organizations to break free from legacy constraints and embrace the full potential of the cloud, minimizing disruption and maximizing business value.