Case Study: The County of San Luis Obispo achieves $580,000 annual savings and improved business agility with OpenText

SLO unlocks business-critical application with Visual COBOL, realizing improved business agility and substantial cost savings

The County of San Luis Obispo faced a strategic challenge: its critical, custom-built COBOL property tax system from the 1970s ran on an expensive mainframe with an aging development team, making maintenance costly and talent hard to find. To align with the county’s Windows-focused IT strategy and reduce infrastructure complexity, SLO needed to re-host the application to a modern, flexible platform without disrupting business continuity.

Working with Tiburon Technologies (later EMC) and Micro Focus, SLO re-hosted the application using Visual COBOL and .NET, executing a carefully staged, user-driven testing program to ensure accuracy. The move eliminated emulation, preserved four decades of business logic, and delivered higher-quality, faster fixes—while realizing long-term annual savings of $580,000, improving developer productivity and making future enhancements and hiring easier.

The County of San Luis Obispo

Shawn Shurick

IT Project Manager