Paper | June 25, 2026
by Dr. Marc L. Brogle, Principal Advisor, Modernization & Transformation, DXC Technology and Nathan Snyder, Revenue Lead, GrowthX, DXC Technology
Across industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare and the public sector, thousands of organizations are running mission-critical systems built on CA Gen — now a fourth-generation application development environment. But active adoption of the tool peaked in the 1990s, and today organizations using CA Gen face major challenges. These include high licensing costs, a skills/talent shortage and architectural constraints. And although Broadcomm, which acquired CA Gen in 2018, has not announced an end-of-life date, Investment in new capabilities is negligible, the product roadmap is minimal and support quality has declined.
Organizations no longer can afford to think about whether to modernize applications built on CA Gen, but how to do it without incurring large costs or business disruption.
Unfortunately, most organizations that have attempted CA Gen modernization without an industrialized methodology have failed, because business logic is trapped in generated code, and the risks of manual rewrites are compounded by the fact that these applications are typically large, complex and critical for the business, meaning there's zero tolerance for downtime or functional regression.
For various reasons, GenAI on its own is unsuitable as a CA Gen modernization engine. But there is a way to meet the challenge of modernization. DXC has developed a methodology that delivers functional equivalence, eliminates vendor dependency and enables cloud-ready architectures.
At the heart of DXC’s approach is XACT, a proprietary, industrialized conversion factory developed and refined over more than a decade of CA Gen modernization engagements. XACT is not a generic code translation tool. It’s a purpose-built conversion framework designed specifically for the CA Gen encyclopedia model, devoted to enabling functional equivalence and AI-accelerated delivery. Unlike any competitor, DXC owns this tooling outright rather than reselling a third-party product.
DXC has successfully modernized CA Gen environments ranging from small portfolios of a few hundred action blocks to large enterprises with tens of thousands of action blocks and complex multisystem integration footprints.
Representative outcomes from DXC’s CA Gen modernization history include:
1. For a leading U.S. healthcare insurance provider, 36,000+ CA Gen action blocks were modernized to a cloud-ready Java architecture on Azure Kubernetes Service. Outcome: Risk of 10x increase in license costs mitigated; 57% reduction in annual software licensing costs; and release frequency increased from 2 to 26 per year.
2. For a large healthcare payer serving over 100 million members, DXC migrated CA Gen backend from z/OS to native Java on AWS/Linux/EKS. Outcome: Delivered projected savings exceeding $60 million over 6 years and eliminating all CA Gen vendor lock-in.
3. For an enterprise previously dependent on CA Gen on HP-UX (end of life), DXC migrated the entire system to a cloud-ready environment at a fraction of the cost of a full replacement, delivering on schedule and within budget. The client described this positive result/outcome as unexpected.
For any organization sitting on a CA Gen estate — watching license bills climb, knowledge holders retire and competitors pull ahead on agility — this white paper is essential reading. It cuts through the myths about manual rewrites and generative AI shortcuts, explains precisely why those approaches fail and presents a proven, low-risk alternative backed by real client outcomes.
Register here to receive your copy of the complete paper, Escaping the CA Gen Trap.
Dr. Marc L. Brogle, Principal Advisor, Modernization & Transformation, DXC Technology, advises clients and internal teams across industries on complex initiatives, bridging strategy, architecture and execution to deliver sustainable business outcomes. He has also served as a technology solutions leader for DXC Europe in financial services. Connect with Marc on LinkedIn.
Nathan Snyder, Modernization as a Service Leader and Revenue Lead, GrowthX, DXC Technology, is building a new revenue operation for DXC Technology's modernization services. Prior to this, as a global leader, he built and ran a DXC solutions group across 10 countries; he has also led large teams at major financial services companies. Connect with Nathan on LinkedIn.
