At midnight on February 29, ITSD marked the end of the Lab's mainframe era when members of the Information Systems and Services Department pulled the plug on an outsourced IBM mainframe computer system in southern California.

Operated for ISS since 1998 by various third-party providers, including Litton Computer Services and Acxiom, Inc., the outsourced IBM mainframe hosted several of the Laboratory's legacy administrative applications while ISS staff members completed the strategic transition from mainframe to UNIX-based processing. The long-awaited opportunity to hit the "off" switch was made possible by the completion of the conversion of the legacy "BTR" Travel system, a 1970's-technology, COBOL-based batch processing application, to the new Web-based Gelco Travel Manager system.

As a result, the Laboratory will enjoy a significant cost savings from the elimination of service fees. Then there's the benefit of no longer having to support obsolete and difficult-to-support technologies such as COBOL, dBase III, and FoxPro, and an extensive collection of increasingly antiquated hardware and software components that were required for remote communications, terminal emulation and printing. With the stewardship of these legacy mainframe applications behind them, ISS can now devote its full resources to present and future strategic objectives.