Case Study: ISI-Exeter achieves fast, flexible deployment to multiple RDBMS with OpenText Acu4GL

Micro Focus Acu4GL delivers fast and flexible deployment from data files to multiple RDBMS

Interactive Systems, Inc. (ISI-Exeter) develops COBOL-based warehouse management and financial systems for high-throughput, mission-critical environments. When customers demanded UNIX and relational database support, ISI-Exeter faced the prospect of re-hosting millions of lines of code across heavily customized installations with a small team and zero tolerance for downtime, so they needed a way to add RDBMS support with minimal changes.

ISI-Exeter selected OpenText Acu4GL to dynamically map traditional ISAM COBOL I/O to SQL and automate most of the conversion, allowing a single COBOL codebase to target multiple RDBMS platforms. The transparent, per-customer conversions improved availability, recoverability, and reporting (including self-service dashboards), reduced development risk and complexity, and preserved productivity—delivering the required database flexibility without a risky, time-consuming rewrite.

ISI-Exeter

Dennis Charles

Senior Vice President