Case Study: Advanced achieves rapid cloud delivery and near-instant customer onboarding with OpenText Visual COBOL

COBOL deployment using Docker streamlines cloud delivery, enabling optimized server infrastructure, rapid time-to-market, and DevOps practices

Advanced, a provider of software for public sector, enterprise and health care organizations, needed a cloud version of its long-standing e5 accounting system. e5—originally developed in the 1990s and producing COBOL code—totals over 40 million lines of code, so a rewrite was not feasible; the company needed a lightweight, high-performance way to deliver a scalable, cost-effective SaaS offering without disrupting existing functionality.

Advanced built CloudFinancials by containerizing Visual COBOL applications with Docker and running them as microservices on AWS, adding PostgreSQL support and seamless Java integration. Each customer gets isolated microservice containers, enabling near-zero configuration and scaling via Docker Swarm; onboarding time fell from half a day to minutes, deployments are automated through CI/CD, and the platform delivers higher server density, centralized logging/health checks, self-healing and more cost-effective RDBMS options.

Advanced

Gary Cowell

Solution Architect