According to ANU's director of corporate information services, Rick van Haeften, the cost of staying on the mainframe was just too high.

"We were paying six figure sums annually just for licensing, and then there was the staff," he said.

"It prompted us to move as quickly as possible. It's hard to justify when you are only hosting two core applications.

"But the moving cost wasn't as significant as we first envisaged. This is because we made the decision about how much data conversion was really required and how much could be archived."

One of the remaining applications was the core Parking Infringements Management System (PIMS), based on Software AG's Adabas and Natural technology, which had been operating since the early 1980s.