① Journal · Benchmarks
Rocket Software (Rocket) is now several portfolios stitched together. After closing the 2.275 billion dollar acquisition of OpenText's Application Modernization and Connectivity business, the old Micro Focus heritage tools, the legacy ASG estate, and Rocket's own products all bill under one logo on different metrics. Benchmarking Rocket spend means reading those seams, because that is where duplicated cost and inconsistent terms hide.
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Get expert help →Rocket grew by acquisition, and its mainframe relevant catalog reflects that. The former Micro Focus development and emulation tools, picked up through the OpenText AMC deal that closed in 2024, sit alongside the ASG estate acquired in 2021 and Rocket's own MultiValue and modernization products. Each arrived with its own metric. Some products license per named user or developer seat, some per core or vCPU for deployment, some on a perpetual plus support basis, and Rocket has been steadily moving parts of the catalog toward subscription.
That mix is why a single Rocket benchmark is the wrong lens. The useful exercise is to benchmark each product against the metric it actually uses, then look hard at the seams between them, because consolidation under one vendor often leaves overlapping tools and inconsistent renewal dates that quietly cost money.
Across Rocket estates the spend falls into a few buckets, each with a different leak. The benchmark is to test the count behind each one against real usage:
| Spend bucket | Typical metric | Where it leaks |
|---|---|---|
| Development tools (ex Micro Focus) | Named user or developer seat | Seats provisioned and never reclaimed when teams shrink |
| Deployment runtime | Per core or vCPU | Cores licensed for capacity that was decommissioned |
| Emulation and connectivity | Per seat, moving to subscription | Perpetual to subscription conversion priced on a stale seat count |
| Legacy ASG and MultiValue | Concurrent users or device | Overlap with newer Rocket tools doing the same job |
The pattern unique to Rocket is consolidation overlap. When one vendor owns formerly competing tools, customers frequently pay for two products that solve the same problem because nobody re-rationalized the estate after the acquisitions. The largest savings often come from collapsing that overlap and reclaiming idle seats and cores, not from arguing the per seat rate.
A defensible Rocket benchmark starts with a true count: active developer seats actually in use, cores actually running, and a map of where two tools overlap in function. Watch any perpetual to subscription conversion closely, because the conversion is commonly priced from the entitled seat count rather than the used one, which bakes shelfware into the new recurring fee. Align the renewal dates across the consolidated portfolio so the vendor cannot play one expiry against another. External rate bands are a useful check, but with Rocket the bigger lever is structural: count, overlap, and conversion terms.
The general method is in the guide on benchmarking your mainframe software spend, and the emulation angle is covered in Rocket vs IBM terminal emulation licensing. The sibling reads are benchmarking IBM spend and benchmarking Software AG spend. When the Rocket renewal lands and the conversion is on the table, our Rocket Software license negotiation work makes sure the count and the overlap are settled before signature. The estate view sits in the Rocket Software licensing hub.