About Fidelity Investments

Fidelity Investments is the largest mutual fund company in the United States and a leading provider of financial services, investment management, retirement, and brokerage services.

The problem

Fidelity's users were satisfied with their iSeries hardware, operating system, and application software, but the platform made it hard to train new staff and to integrate the applications with other internal and external systems. With stretched budgets, the high administration cost of adopting and maintaining new applications made a wholesale replacement impractical. OfficeVision/400 functions formed a large part of the applications, and a central goal was to minimize disruption and avoid retraining experienced users.

The solution

After narrowing the field to providers who could meet its company-specific requirements, Fidelity selected Infinite i to migrate its applications to industry-standard servers without overtaxing its development team. Because development followed consistent standards, migrating the source programs raised only minor issues. The decision rested on several Infinite i characteristics: the relational database migrated automatically from DB2/400 to Infinite DB with no modification of data files or mapping; online documentation migrated cleanly (one application's 350-plus-page manual was migrated in roughly 15 minutes and was immediately usable); printing and spooling were supported with no change to printer files; and the environment offered development tools with stronger connectivity and integration than the other modernization approaches Fidelity evaluated.

The outcome

Since installing Infinite i, Fidelity has resolved ongoing concerns about backend support, and new development can be done on the front end with modern tools — achieving its goal of software development that is independent of any single system platform.