Case Study
The client is a large public healthcare organization in North America.
IBM Consulting is IBM’s professional services organization, helping enterprises plan and deliver transformations from strategy and architecture through modernization, implementation, and operations, with around 160,000 consultants worldwide.
12 Million
lines of code
written in a COBOL-like
language
96%
backlog
reduced in
under two months
“CAST plays a crucial role; it provides the context AI agents need to become more accurate and autonomous.”
Anuj Gupta
Executive Architect and CTO, Custom Application Management
CAST Imaging enabled IBM Consulting to ground AI in deterministic application context, translate buried business rules into clear plain English, and accelerate the transition and modernization of a 40-year-old mainframe application.
Challenge
A major government healthcare organization relied on a 40-year-old legacy platform written in a primitive, COBOL-like language – CA Gen – and expanded over decades of enhancements. The application had become extremely difficult to understand, with almost no usable documentation and critical knowledge being lost due to retirements.
At the same time, the client wanted to modernize toward Azure, C#, .NET, and SQL, making rapid context capture and transfer essential.
Solution
IBM deployed CAST Imaging on the client’s premises to automatically map structures, links, JCL, and business flows, evaluate technical debt, and create a reliable knowledge base of the application.
This intelligence was then connected through CAST Imaging’s MCP Server to the client’s AI environment, enabling AI to work from grounded application context and translate buried business rules into clear, plain English for IBM’s maintenance team and the client’s modernization teams.
Results
By feeding AI with deterministic context from CAST, IBM team shortened the transition time to less than a month and accelerated understanding of the vast COBOL-like estate.
IBM reported resolving more than 200 tickets and reducing the backlog by 96% in under two months.
CAST insights also helped the maintenance team respond faster and more precisely to support issues, while giving modernization teams clearer guidance for migration decisions.
