Case Study: Insurance Commission of Western Australia achieves 75% platform cost reduction and rapid disaster recovery with OpenText

Modernizing while maintaining application integrity – delivers against strategic project goals

The Insurance Commission of Western Australia (ICWA), the sole compulsory third‑party motor injury insurer in WA, faced an expensive, inflexible outsourced mainframe environment running ~1,200 COBOL programs for 360 staff. The organization needed to cut operating costs, boost productivity, support new business initiatives, shorten disaster‑recovery time and reduce vendor dependence, but replacing or rewriting core systems was seen as risky and time‑consuming.

ICWA re‑hosted its mainframe workload to an OpenText/Micro Focus COBOL/CICS platform on Linux Intel servers with an IBM UDB database, recompiling over a million lines of COBOL while mostly leaving code unchanged and exposing services via web services for Java and client apps. The move was completed within 12 months and delivered a 75% reduction in platform costs, ROI in under a year, overnight batch windows cut from 4–6 hours to ~1 hour, disaster recovery reduced from three days to less than one, and a modern, scalable environment that retired the old mainframe while enabling reuse of services across the business.

Insurance Commission of Western Australia

Glenn Myers

Chief information officer