Case Study: City of Miami achieves 50% IT cost reduction and faster EMS response times with OpenText

IT modernization helps City of Miami reduce EMS response times and halve IT costs

The City of Miami’s Fire‑Rescue Department relied on a 20‑year‑old mainframe CAD system that had become costly to maintain and difficult to integrate with modern tools. Faced with either rewriting 80 applications (180,000 lines of code) over two to three years at more than double the cost, the city chose application and platform modernization to meet growing demand more quickly and affordably.

Working with Micro Focus, Astadia and Idea Integration, the city converted proprietary Unisys COBOL to Micro Focus COBOL running on Windows Server and the .NET Framework and migrated the DMSII database to Microsoft SQL Server. The move—completed in six months—cut IT operations costs by about 50% (saving roughly $900,000/year), eliminated scheduled downtime, improved disaster recovery and uptime, sped emergency response, and enabled easier integration and future features like automatic vehicle location and GPS.

City of Miami

Kevin Burns

Information Systems Manager