"Telstra, Australia's major Teleco, required a critical overhaul to the applications managing the Data Products environment. It was essential the project delivered with absolute certainty given the mission critical nature of the applications and time to market pressures for product developments.

Telstra did a global search for a specialist services organization capable of handling the complex migration with the assurance required. Sector 7 was selected due to their track record, experience (migrating VAX OpenVMS to SUN SOLARIS) and project planning detail. The project had many features that made it not "run of the mill".

(a) the application controlled the order capture and automatic provisioning of data networks for the majority of large corporations across Australia
(b) the application was mission critical and required very complex planning and management to ensure stability in the corporate data networks and service billing
(c) the application used an very old version of DEC's RDB utilizing a pre-SQL language (RDML) for conversion to Oracle
(d) the code was written in VMS PASCAL (1.5m LINES OF CODE) which needed to be converted to C. The UNIX PASCAL compiler was not compatible due to DEC extensions
(e) the application used over 200 complex VMS system service calls including asynchronous QIO to X.25 and X.29 device for the provisioning of corportate switched data networks
(f) the application had over 1500 undocumented binary protocols that controlled older switches that required on the fly bit wise conversions
(g) there were critical and absolute deadlines to meet and Telstra required a market competitive fixed priced project completion schedule .

Sector7 performed the majority of the project in the USA and then completed the final testing, QA and production deployment in Melbourne Australia.

The UNIX/C version of the application has been operational for 4 years + and has permitted Telstra to extend product offerings, move forward with major process changes and enhance and stabilise data network provisioning.

During this time Telstra was continually impressed with the professionalism and dedication of the Sector7 organization. When our code threw unexpected 'curved balls' at them the Sector7 team worked 18 hours days to recapture the time.

Sector7 continually delivered more than expected from the initial project scoping and planning exercises through all release phases, on time and under budget."

Norm Beck
SDMN Manager
Telstra