Our Expertise With The Cortex Migration System (Cortex-MS)

The Cortex-MS Software

The Cortex Migration System^TM (Cortex-MS^TM) was almost completely developed in France by Sisro from 1974 to 1984. In 1984, Sisro entered into a world-wide licensing agreement with IBM which distributed Cortex-MS to its VSE customers from 1986 to 1997 under the name MVS Migration System (MVS-MS). The Allen Systems Group (ASG) bought Sisro in 2000 and currently owns the Cortex-MS product.

The important milestones in the life of the Cortex-MS product are:

1974 - JCL Generator and restart manager - The ancestor to Cortex-PDB (Production Data Base)
1978 - DOS to OS/VS1 translator with limited support for JCL, Assembler, COBOL, IDCAMS and SORT
1981 - First cut-over en-masse at CNPBTP in Paris
1982 - First mass-conversion at BPBA in Nantes, with introduction of the iterative component of the method.
1983 - Customisation Exit Routines
1984 - IBM licenses the product for distribution; Sisro packages the product for end-user usage, writes the documentation,
and sets up support centers in Europe and the U.S.
1986 - IBM announces MVS-MS (MVS Migration System) in October
1987 - Limited enhancements to Cortex-DMT and Cortex-Switch

Since 1987, Cortex-MS has been functionally stabilised, i.e. it received no significant functional enhancement. During the 1990s, Cortex-MS received a few technical enhancements, such as allowing exit routines to be written in VS COBOL II or COBOL/370 (these changes were mandated by IBM's drop of support for the VS COBOL for OS/VS compiler). In 1993, the back-end portion of the product which converts the PCL language to MVS JCL was replaced with version 5 of Sisro's Cortex-PDB stand-alone product. Although these changes made it somewhat easier to write Cortex-PDB customisation exit routines, they did not allow other components of Cortex-MS to handle additional programming languages, utility programs or features of the VSE JCL.

Cortex-MS is still marketed by ASG, although it doesn't support many of the JCL features, utility programs or languages commonly used by most VSE/ESA or z/VSE installations today. In particular, Cortex-MS does not support the following: Conditional JCL, VS COBOL II and COBOL for VSE, VSAM-managed SAM, CA-Dynam and Epic utilities, IDCAMS BACKUP/RESTORE, SYNCSORT/DFSORT/CA-SORT extensions, FTP, SQL/DS (DB2), CA-Datacom, Adabas, back-up/restore utilities, and many other VSE components (full list available on request). A VSE installation that licenses Cortex-MS must dedicate a large amount of resources to develop the custom code required to obtain a reasonable level of automation when converting its VSE applications to z/OS.

Our Expertise

I (Gilbert Saint-Flour) have been involved with the Cortex Migration System (Cortex-MS) from 1980 until 2000; during that long period, I made important contributions to Cortex-MS in the following areas:

In 1981 and 1982, I wrote the first mass-submission tools to automate the loading of the VSE source inventory and its processing with various Cortex-MS components. Besides obvious savings in time and personnel needed to process the VSE application inventory, this automation resulted in the introduction of the iterative element of the mass-conversion method.
In 1983, I designed and developed the RPG translator component of Cortex-DMT. In 1984, I significantly re-designed and enhanced the Assembler and JCL translator components.
In 1985 and 1986, I took an active part in the creation of the Cortex-MS support center in New York as part of the licensing agreement between IBM and Sisro. During that period, I supported IBM and their field-test users in the U.S. and, at the same time, helped Computer Task Group (CTG) develop a VSE/MVS conversion service business based on Cortex-MS.
In 1985, I designed and prototyped a new method to transfer application data from VSE to MVS. The method was adopted by CTG in 1986 (File Transfer System, or FTS) and, to a smaller extent, by Sisro in 1987 in Cortex-SWITCH.
In 1985 and 1986 also, I wrote a significant amount of new documentation (including the Specification Check-list) for the IBM team in charge of re-structuring the Cortex-MS documentation. After IBM announced the product under the name MVS-MS in October 1986, I took an active part in training IBM SEs at the IBM support facility in Dallas.
From 1982 until 1999, most of my activity consisted in performing VSE/MVS conversions with Cortex-MS which I customised to meet the needs of dozens of customers. Throughout that period, I continuously designed and developed numerous software tools (now called MS-Tools) to enhance Cortex-MS and gradually replace most of its components. Many of these tools formed the basis upon which I built the Prism Conversion System (Prism-CS) in 1999.
In 1997 and 1998, I very actively participated in the design and the redaction of the VSE to OS/390 Migration Workbook (SG24-2043) which contains several references to the Cortex-MS product.