Case Study: German Pension Fund Baden‑Württemberg achieves 70% faster response times and modern COBOL microservices with OpenText

Building fast and future-proof microservices based on proven COBOL applications

The German Pension Fund, which administers pensions for millions and employs about 61,000 staff, relied on complex COBOL business logic for mission‑critical services like clerk lookup and an organization-wide phone directory. High volumes—up to 10,000 incoming mail items daily and 20,000 directory users—exposed a performance bottleneck in communication between COBOL and Java components, and a full rewrite of proven business logic was impractical.

Using Visual COBOL for Eclipse to compile COBOL into Java bytecode and Micro Focus SmartLinkage, the team ran COBOL directly in the JVM and exposed functionality as web-service microservices. This preserved existing logic while improving integration and debugging, delivering a 70% reduction in response times, cutting batch runtimes from ~30 to 10 minutes, and enabling a single, maintainable codebase with modern tooling and more efficient operations.

German Pension Fund Baden-Württemberg

Peter Palmreuther

Senior Java Developer, Java Competence Center