"We thought in Hexacta as the partner who could offer us the experience and the knowledge we need to migrate technology. Hexacta is a young company, integrated by professionals of excellent level, with methodology and, above all, with the commitment, the flexibility and the attitude needed to overcome the difficulties of a critical challenge for our company.” 
Daniel Fiducia, CIO, TGS.

Brief description of the company

Transportadora de Gas Del Sur S.A. (TGS) operates the largest pipeline system in the country and Latin America. It carries 60% of gas consumed in Argentina and supplies directly to distributors, electrical generators and industries, through a system of 8,627 Km long pipeline.

TGS is one of leading processors of natural gas and one of the largest marketers of liquid natural gas (LNG).
It was the first company in the regulated gas sector to integrate the standards of ISO 14001 and 9001.

The challenge

TGS brought forward a process of technological infrastructure and software applications upgrade.

In the first instance, Hexacta made a migration of their hardware and database infrastructure and later defined a high level technological architecture to perform the migration of their applications.

Later, TGS chose Hexacta to conduct the migration and reengineering of its critical PowerBuilder client/server applications to J2EE.
The project consisted of a number of projects carried out in 2 years and 5 months.
Due to the costumer´s satisfaction, Hexacta continued pursuing evolutionary and corrective maintenance of applications.

Solution

The first phase of this initiative, called project MAITE, was completed and carried on the migration of hardware equipment and databases.

The second phase of project MAITE, which took five months, aimed to migrate migrate 6 critical applications for TGS business towards the new J2EE web architecture.

The main responsibilities were:

• Defining a detailed technological architecture.
• Documenting the functional solution and technical design of the application to build.
• Implementing the migration and reengineering of the applications.
• Performing technological and methodological coaching to the TGS systems area.
• Developing and testing of applications.
• Conducting training for new applications.
• Providing assistance during the migration and implementation in production.

After the development project was conclude, Hexacta was hired to take care of the application´s corrective maintenance and evolving process, and for the development of other smaller reengineering solutions. This project lasted 4 years.

Applied Technologies

Defined architecture is based on J2EE, using:

• Tapestry and Tacos as presentation and operations frameworks along with Ajax.
• Hibernate as a persistence framework.
• Spring for bean wiring and implementation of aspects of security, logging, exception handling and transaction management.
• Automatic testing: Junit, DBUnit, Selenium, Watir and Hudson.
• JaperReports for the generation of reports, POI to produce files in Excel format, JFreeChart for the generation of graphics, Log4J, Mule, SAPJCo for interfaces with SAP, Javassist, Quartz for the implementation of planned works, Apache Commons, etc.
• The application server is Oracle IAS. The database is Oracle 10g.