Case Study: CEP Solutions achieves 80% cost savings and 50% application performance improvement with OpenText Visual COBOL

Visual COBOL offers 80% cost savings over the rewrite alternative, delivering new functionality with a modern development environment

CEP Solutions, an Italian software firm with more than 30 years’ experience, develops the SIOGERE payroll and HR system used by consultants and SMBs. Facing regulatory demands and the need to move from a 32‑bit to a 64‑bit environment and add web access, the company ruled out a full C++ rewrite (estimated at €2M) and found alternative COBOL offerings unreliable, so it sought a low‑risk way to modernize while preserving decades of business logic.

CEP migrated to Micro Focus Visual COBOL for Visual Studio and Micro Focus COBOL Server, reusing most existing code and integrating with .NET to standardize development. The upgrade was completed in three months, delivered about 80% cost savings versus a rewrite, boosted application performance by roughly 50%, modernized the development environment, preserved competitive advantage, and enabled web (and future mobile) access.

CEP Solutions

Rosanna Villani

Development Director