Case Study: Barmenia achieves rapid mainframe cost savings and stable COBOL-to-AIX migration with OpenText (Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition)

Barmenia realigns its IT infrastructure with Micro Focus

Barmenia, a major independent German insurer with about 3,300 staff and roughly 1.95 million policies, needed to modernize a decades-old mainframe application landscape. As part of a strategic “differentiated” migration, the insurer decided to move core systems (inventory, claims, parts of accounting and printing) from an expensive new mainframe to distributed platforms (AIX/Oracle) on a tight timeline to cut rising operating costs.

Using Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition and associated tooling, and with implementation support from adesso, Barmenia ported its COBOL applications to a mixed Windows development and AIX production environment while migrating hierarchical data to a relational database. The move allowed one mainframe to be shut down in early 2011, delivered stable, high-performance production operations, produced substantial annual operating savings and paid back within 12 months; COBOL remains the company’s chosen development standard.

Barmenia

Lutz Subel

IT Service Management