Breaking Free from Heritage Infrastructure with Rocket^® Enterprise Suite 

Company

Industry: Public Sector

The National Research Council (CNR) is Italy's largest public research body, overseeing 86 institutes. CNR provides research services and manages approximately 10,000 employees through centralized IT services, including its mission-critical payroll system.

Challenge

CNR needed to modernize its payroll system without disrupting monthly paychecks, all while facing rising licensing costs and a shortage of skilled technical talent.

CNR faced mounting pressure from its proprietary hardware and rising licensing costs, which increased management expenses year over year. Upgrading demanded specialized expertise that was increasingly hard to find, and an expiring outsourcing contract added operational risk. With payroll regulations changing almost monthly, CNR needed a modern, cost-effective platform that could migrate safely, without interrupting critical payroll operations.

Solution

Rocket Software and partner GFT Technologies migrated CNR's payroll application to an open, Linux^®-based infrastructure while preserving exact system behavior.

Rocket Software partnered with GFT Technologies to move CNR's payroll application onto a modern, open Linux^® infrastructure. GFT used Rocket^® Enterprise Server to emulate the previous hardware environment, ensuring a seamless transition, and built a custom automatic JCL converter to translate highly specific heritage components into a standard format. The teams also relied on the Rocket Software Debugger for efficient, line-by-line issue resolution, speeding up problem determination throughout the migration.

Results

The migration preserved CNR's payroll functionality while dramatically boosting performance, cutting costs, and enabling a scalable, cloud-ready future.

CNR's new system performs exactly as before, but faster. Operations that once took hours or days now take minutes, generally under an hour, significantly increasing productivity. The migration also gave CNR a cloud-ready architecture, paving the way for future scalability and stronger disaster recovery. A new database with a native ODBC interface further improved data accessibility, allowing surrounding applications to access payroll data more efficiently. Altogether, CNR reduced software costs by two-thirds, cut hardware costs by more than half, and increased developer productivity by 70%.

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