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LDDS-WorldCom Goes the Distance with Zortec _______

System Z and TranZform Unifies Long Distance Billing

As the long distance carrier industry matures, one key to growth for successful entries is the ability to acquire other long distance providers. This has many benefits - bigger customer base, expaned geographical territories, economies of scale. It also has one major drawback - dissimilar and often incompatible computerized billing systems.

LDDS Communications, a business-oriented long distance provider, found themselves with a panoply of computers and software systems for doing long distance billing. Hardware included such diverse platforms as Data General MV's running AOS and Wang VS systems. Managing them all was a nighmare. The ultimate goal was one unified billing system. However, for at least a few years, their software would have to run on more than one hardware platform.

According to Stu Miller, Vice President of MIS for LDDS, System Z was the key to mergin their seperate billing systems. "First, we tried COBOL translators, but that just didn't work. Then we looked a 4GLs, but we didn't like the cost to get into one and we didn't like the training effort involved."

"System Z was different. It ran on lots of hardware environments. I was surprised how quickly our COBOL programmers picked it up. It gave us what we wanted in a rapid application development environment, and Zortec also offers the capability to convert COBOL to System Z, which got us going very quickly.

"Now we have Z on Data General AOS/VS, on multiple Unix platforms, and on several PC's. On all of those, we get the performace we need, even with our transaction volumes. We're doing transaction processing with millions of records. We've really given Z a workout. And we've had a lot of good support from the staff at Zortec. We didn't hesitate to get on the phone and they didn't hesitate to respond. I don't know of any other company, and other vendor that we deal with, who's that dedicated in support."

And how do COBOL programmers respond to Z? "After using Z, it's very tough to get them to go back to COBOL. They get up to speed quickly with Z and they just don't want to use anything else because they are so productive with Z. And in our industry, applications have to change every day. With the ability of Z to help us respond to that, it's made our business more competitive.

What advice would he give others looking at Zortec? "Crawl out from under your COBOL umbrella. I know it's tough for the MIS director, who's inundated with 'CASE is the way to go' and 'SAA is the way to go'. But if he would get off the jargon kick and really look at what his business needs, and what's the fastest, cleanest way to get there, he'd find that System Z really gets him going in the right direction."