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CIBC’s success story about upgrading 40,000 COBOL programs

By Vikash Kumar posted Wed April 23, 2025 11:25 AM

  

CIBC + IBM

CIBC’s success story about upgrading 40,000 COBOL programs 

Industry

Banking / Financial

Business Challenge

To maintain the highest service standards for its customers, CIBC had to upgrade business-critical mainframe applications to use the latest IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS 6.

Solution

The banking applications are used by both employees at banking centres, and customers. For example, when a banking transaction is performed on a mobile phone, the account balance is automatically updated. An application runs on the mainframe to update the balance in real-time and keeps track of the account balance and fees. A combination of batch applications, online applications (COBOL/CICS), and data management applications (COBOL/IMS, COBOL/Db2) were upgraded to Enterprise COBOL 6.

Transformation

CIBC successfully upgraded 100% or their 40,000 COBOL applications in three years to leverage the latest IBM z15 hardware features and IBM compiler optimization technology available on the bank's IBM z15 mainframe.

Results

  • Significant cost reduction in operating costs
  • Cleaner code, reducing technical debt
  • Avoid the risks of using unsupported compilers, with additional support extension fees
  • Skills upgrade for new employees (to learn and understand the functionality of their code base)

“We chose to do this upgrade for currency, stability, and to avoid extended support costs. If you can also get some benefit from reduced CPU consumption, why wouldn’t you do that? You’re going to eventually need to upgrade anyway. You can’t stay in an old compiler forever, so the sooner you move on, the better off you are.”

 

 “The upgrade was mostly straightforward.

” 

- Murray Schock

Director, Mainframe Shared Services,  CIBC

To download this story, please visit - https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/viewdocument/cibcs-success-story-about-upgradin

To learn more about upgrades to IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS 6, including other customer stories, the new product IBM COBOL Upgrade Advisor for z/OS, and more, visit our COBOL Migration Portal at https://www.ibm.com/docs/SS6SG3_latest/migration-portal.html

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