Case Study
Mercer is a global consulting firm dedicated to reimagining the world of work, reshaping retirement and investment outcomes, and unlocking health and well-being for clients, colleagues, and communities. With operations in over 130 countries and more than 20,000 colleagues, Mercer combines global scale with deep expertise in talent, health, retirement, and investment solutions.
Proactive
monitoring
of resiliency to avoid
production outages
12-month
advance notice
of end-of-life
technologies
“CAST Highlight gives us objective insights across our applications. It’s like having vital signs for our software portfolio.”
Alan Capper
CIO
Mercer strengthens software resiliency and cuts tech debt
Challenge
Mercer’s CIO, Alan Capper, and his organization manage a large, complex portfolio of custom applications accumulated over decades through mergers and acquisitions. Each system carried its own architecture and web of dependencies, leading to growing levels of technical debt.
Manual tracking of technology obsolescence was fragmented and slow, making it difficult to ensure applications remained resilient and ready for future business needs.
Solution
Mercer deployed CAST Highlight to automatically analyze their applications and better understand their software including resiliency, technical debt, and efficiency.
These objective insights supported their ATOM (Application Technology Obsolescence Management) program and are integrated into their Vital Signs dashboard for proactively monitoring their applications. Further integration with ITSM and development backlogs ensured remediation actions flowed directly into teams’ workflows.
Results
Mercer is now continuously monitoring all applications with fact-based metrics on resiliency and efficiency. This enables them to proactively stay ahead of software issues that could cause production outages before they happen. Tech debt reduction efforts are prioritized and they identify end of life technologies for remediation 12 months in advance.
Mercer also piloted generative AI combined with CAST Highlight’s Green Software Insights to automatically remediate inefficient code.
