TechChannel announced the honorees of its 2024 IBM Z Rising Stars recognition that highlights emerging talent in the IT ecosystem. This year’s list includes Uladzislau Kalesnikau and Aliaksandr Shautsou of IBA Group. The young mainframe experts are acknowledged for their innovative work in advancing IBM Z technologies.

Mainframe Modernization at IBA Group

Uladzislau Kalesnikau, a team lead at IBA Group, is committed to modernizing mainframe technology. As the lead developer of Zowe plugins for IntelliJ IDEA, Kalesnikau makes it easier for young developers and newcomers to engage with the mainframe environment. With four years in mainframe development, he made an outstanding contribution to integrating modern tools into the mainframe environment. Kalesnikau also plays an active role in the global mainframe community, promoting Zowe plugins and DevOps practices.

Aliaksandr Shautsou is a middle software engineer at IBA Group’s mainframe development team. He has contributed to Zowe initiatives that empower developers to work in modern integrated development environments like IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code.

BACKGROUND

Our client is a multinational technology and consulting firm, renowned for its contributions to the development of computer hardware and software. They required help to identify which projects within the company were generating profits and which were not meeting financial expectations. This evaluation was necessary to optimize resource allocation and improve overall business efficiency.

CHALLENGES

• Profitability calculation and P&L construction for BM Global Business Support projects, including analytics by region, industry, and client cluster.
• Constructing of a calculated target model.

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

• Creating and optimizing applications in IBM Analytics Planning.
• Writing scripts to calculate targets.
• Integration with external systems and development of ETL procedures to obtain data from third-party sources.
• Using a Java user interface for direct access to cubes (via REST API).
• Presenting data both in cubes for data input and reporting cubes, organizing export/import of data.
• Setting up access rights and monitoring the work of users.

KEY RESULTS

1. Improving the relevance and reliability of profit and loss statement calculations for current and planned projects.
2. Stable system operation under high loads thanks to an optimal calculation process and system configuration.
3. Expansion of the system to cover LA (Latin America), EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), and APAC (Asia Pacific) regions with consideration to regional specifics.

Challenges

1. Merging data from diverse HR platforms
2. Navigating multiple disparate HR systems, which had created data redundancies and inconsistencies, making it hard to extract a single source of truth
3. Development of data flow mappings
4. Data quality management implementation
5. Data masking for personally identifiable data based on access level
6. ETL design and implementation data integration into the global DWH solution
7. Making sure that the cloud-based HR solution was compatible with other business tools and systems used in different departments, which was crucial for holistic business operations

Goal

Build SaaS for offices all over the world to manage the administrative processes required to track and support employees

Results

1. HR teams, managers, and employees have secure access to necessary data from anywhere and real-time analytics
2. Migration for 39 countries implemented successfully, taking into account all regulations
3. Developed, reinvented, and modernized the HR system for all HR-related tasks and procedures
4. Advanced encryption and security protocols ensured sensitive HR data is protected
5. Collaboration and self-service capabilities make employees more engaged in teamwork. Satisfaction has increased by 50%
6. Various HR tools and applications were easily integrated, breaking data silos

Challenges

1. Data analysis and visualization from different sources through all departments
2. Hypothesis validation, implementation and the deployment of predictive models
3. Setting up Big Data infrastructure in AWS Cloud
4. Implementation of data quality management
5. Row Level Security implementation for secure access
6. Costly hardware and software licensing

Goal

Create a road traffic analysis solution to manage big volumes of data and cut financial losses

Results

1. The company benefits from up-to-the-minute insights into traffic patterns and congestion, enabling it to provide more accurate and timely information to its customers
2. The Client’s management now makes better-informed decisions, leading to optimized operations, and improved service quality
3. The risks of financial losses are eliminated with the help of protection against unauthorized access
4. Data leaks and compliance violations were eliminated

Background

А huge global company with a strong technology focus turned to IBA Group with the task of transferring their client’s infrastructure to cloud services. At the time of the beginning of cooperation, the end customer of our client used a lot of data storage for the following internal service tasks:

• production cost tracking;
• dialer’s information;
• providing information to dealers,
• information about clients, employees.

The main part of the infrastructure was based on the Oracle database and the Informatica Power Center ETL tool, as well as many other tools such as Cron, Shell Script, Java, JS.

Several years ago, the company’s management decided to migrate the entire infrastructure to the cloud. During modernization, the company brought production processes to a single standard, increasing its structure, including a unified approach to development, implementing an approved technology stack, and ensuring quality control of development.

Business Challenges

During the modernization process, the end client encountered the following difficulties:

1. The existing services of the company were slow, which impacted all processes — from data analysis to hiring employees.
2. Frequent failures due to errors within the services led to a partial loss of data and the inability to make management decisions, prepare accounting reports, prepare data on the movement of warehouse resources, and more.
3. Permanent delays in providing new services due to the slowdown in development or the impossibility of their implementation, led to a decrease in the company’s attractiveness among customers.
4. Scaling within the framework of the old infrastructure could not be carried out without extra payments, due to the low flexibility of vendor licensing offers.
5. Recruitment of the necessary employees such as full-stack developers presented difficulties due to the huge variety of technologies used; cheaper resources were not of the right quality or up to the high standards of the company.

Key Objective #1

Migrate company services to new infrastructure in the cloud.

Key Objective #2

Tailor AWS vendor migration offerings to company services.

Solution Highlights

The customer formed a separate team that was responsible for the innovation and unification of disparate systems into a single infrastructure. IBA Group provided engineers and architects to form custom teams to participate in the adaptation of infrastructure modernization solutions, developing the top-level structure of the entire ecosystem, as well as general approaches and rules for each system separately.

After giving recommendations for the development and auditing of the process, the IBA Group team directly implemented this migration. To improve the quality of decisions made at the architecture design stage, an AWS vendor was involved.

Due to the business’s specific features, each area had its own architecture, for which separate teams were created that were responsible for its adaption and improvement. They were also involved in the transfer of existing services for their area to cloud technologies — AWS Glue, PySpark, ECS, Kubernetes, EMR + PySpark.

One of the important conditions was a “seamless” transition — teams during the migration process ensured that access to existing services remained uninterrupted.

Project Results

Benefits the client received by moving data management to a cloud service:

1. Increased fault tolerance by fixing bugs and using ready-made cloud-platform services for interaction between different customer services.
2. Continuity of current services during the migration process was maintained.
3. Cost reduction in the form of refusal of some server capacities due to the transition to the cloud service.
4. Flexible planning of financial expenses for scaling due to the pay-as-you-go system provided by the cloud solution.
5. Reduced time for recruiting specialists in the IT department by unifying the requirements for them, defining clear rules, and specifying the technology stack.
6. Reduction of the number of narrowly focused specialists without full-time employment due to their retraining in the technology stack adopted by the company.

Business Challenge

Build a secure and scalable data aggregation and analytics cognitive platform that transforms key business processes.

Solution

IBA Group developers worked on the Cognitive Enterprise Data Platform (CEDP). This platform makes it easy to get, share, and integrate enterprise data. Various business units of the company interact with the platform as producers and consumers of data.

Result

CEDP currently contains over 100 enterprise data assets. Datasets include customer master data, product offering master data, unified taxonomy, and more.

CEDP has big data analytics capabilities such as BigSQL, HDFS, DashDB for performance-based analytics, unstructured data annotation capabilities, machine learning, deep learning, and access to IBM Cloud Services.

Business Challenge

Development and support of Enterprise Data Warehouse, ETL processes and web application to process data.

Solution

IBA Group develops a financial planning and forecasting system for customer projects. A web application has been created for project managers to build financial forecasts. They also complete questionnaires and feedback forms used to assign statuses to the projects depending on their possible profitability/loss-making capability. After this data is processed, key performance indicators are generated. The reports generated by the system are submitted for verification to the company management.

A team of 30 developers and 10 technical support specialists is working on the project. They monitor ETL downloads around the clock and respond to user requests.

The system operates in five regions: USA, Asia, Europe, Japan and Latin America. Each region has individual ETL processes configured.

Result

The system generates reports for the company management to determine financial forecasts for the next quarter.

Project Overview

The project was implemented to meet the following challenges:

1. Design and implement a unified data warehouse based on the standard industrial model with a degree of customization up to 30 percent.
2. Implement the algorithms of data upload from the accounting systems of the bank and external sources to the corporate data warehouse in line with the methodology of managerial accounting. To provide a possibility of performing adjustments.
3. Implement the approaches of data cleansing and quality control, as well as business rule verification
4. Build theme–based data marts designed to analyze general ledger data, loan portfolio, managerial accounting, and performance of the network of self–service banking equipment
5. Implement a business glossary of banking terms
6. Develop more than 90 scheduled reports covering the tasks of management reporting and reporting to the parent company and regulators.

Solution

IBA is working as a part of the development team. The IBA responsibilities include requirement analysis; application design; database design, application development; unit, functional and system testing; quality assurance; and support.

The first ten stages of the project were finished on time with excellent references from the customer.

The eleventh stage, namely the enhancement of the application is currently underway.

Project Results

The application was deployed to production in line with the schedule. IBA received excellent references from the customer.

Business Challenge

Support and internal configuration of Unica-based applications for automating marketing processes, and development of ETL applications to collect data from external systems and transfer them to CRM.

Solution

The IBA Group team includes 20 people. Experts are involved in product configuration; create offer templates, project templates, flowcharts. They also develop database models and all ETL processes, and integrate with CRM systems (Atlas, Gaia, Watson Health).

The customer’s website provides for mandatory sign in for customers seeking advice or downloading promotional materials. All customer information is stored in the database. Data is collected, sorted and sent to external system for verification. If it is an existing client, the system returns the user ID. For new clients it creates new IDs. Subsequently, all marketing campaigns are built based on user IDs.

A marketer can customize flowchart, a business logic that triggers further processes. The system makes a decision on each contact: either to immediately send it to CRM for handling by salesperson, or send e-mail with additional materials about the product of interest for the client.

If a customer wants to run an advertising campaign, it may select the appropriate audience from the database. For example, men over 40 who have recently looked into certain products and currently work in a company with more than 10,000 employees. This audience is used to customize emails or test calls.

Result

The system is optimized to work with the largest number of Unica users in the world. This includes 1200 flowcharts that are simultaneously created by marketers around the world. Round-the-clock system utilization: customer offices are located in India, the USA, Romania, Japan and the Philippines.