Micro Focus Cobols the cloud

It is easy to assume that there are many established businesses that are looking enviously at the cloud and wondering about the investment needed to make the transition from on-premise operations when all the major applications are written in Cobol.

There is a language that has a long and venerable reputation in the development of long-lasting, remarkably bullet-proof business management applications. Many thousands of businesses still depend on those applications for their day to day existence. The trouble is, being old the assumption is that those applications will be totally incompatible with cloud-based delivery and operations.

That doesn’t have to be the case, however, and long-time specialists in producing Cobol systems for PCs and other `non-mainframe’ systems platforms, Micro Focus, is building up a growing list of Cobol-dependent customers that have moved applications to the cloud using its Visual COBOL solution.

Two of the latest are Wolters Kluwer and Lumbermen’s Merchandising Corporation with both using Visual COBOL to harness the competitive advantage in using their critical business systems to meet new demands for business innovation.

The Italian branch of global publishing and user information services firm, Wolters Kluwer, sought to provide additional market offerings with its existing software portfolio.  Providing cloud-based services was seen as critical, but the cost of building a new offering was seen as prohibitive. Visual COBOL enabled the company to reach out to new business without having to change its underlying product offering. 

Moving to the cloud with Visual COBOL was far easier than expected: “Visual COBOL has enabled us to achieve higher levels of developer productivity and product quality,” said Sergio Boaretto, Software Engineering Manager at Wolters Kluwer Italy.

As a forest products and building materials buying group, Lumbermen’s Merchandising Corporation faced a need to deliver on key IT initiatives using its existing Unisys mainframe environment, including dealing with concerns over application performance. By reusing its existing investment in COBOL, LMC took core applications to Windows and .NET, gaining a 75 percent improvement in application performance. 

“Visual COBOL has brought our development teams closer together, allowed us to realise significant cost savings and increased our application performance, and as a result our service to our network of independent lumber dealers,”  said Dave McCann, Programming and Operations Supervisor, LMC.  “We are delighted with the results.”

The goal for Micro Focus is to help customers transition from established on-premise environments to new, cloud-based systems with no risk, according to Ed Airey, Product Marketing Director at Micro Focus.  “By reusing investments in proven COBOL systems, our clients can meet future business demands with confidence and speed. We bridge the gap between core COBOL and newer-age technologies such as Cloud, .NET, and mobile,” he said.

 The company claims that Visual COBOL 2.2 is the most advanced Cobol development and deployment solution available for business critical applications, delivering agile application development capabilities for Windows, UNIX, Linux, .NET, JVM and Azure platforms.  This latest update helps developers acquire new and marketable skills, integrate with cutting-edge IT architectures, and improve team collaboration across shared projects for accelerated code delivery.