Micro Focus to support COBOL

NEWBURY, UK: Micro Focus, provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions has announced at the COBOL WG4 standards meeting in Ontario, CA, its continued commitment to current and future COBOL standardization and modernization.

As enterprises increase their focus on ROI from IT spend, Micro Focus urges organizations to modernize COBOL systems and applications to maximize their investments in existing IT systems.

With its support of the International Standards Organization (ISO) 2002 standardization of the COBOL language and active participation in future COBOL standards, Micro Focus enables organizations to modernize their existing systems and cost-effectively extend them to the latest technology innovations, including Web services, J2EE and .NET, without undertaking the costly “rip and replace” approach.

“With over 200 billion lines of COBOL code in production today, this programming language is at the heart of core systems across every industry,” said Stuart McGill, CTO of Micro Focus.

He added: “As CIOs are forced to make some tough decisions on IT spending, it is critical that they modernize and extend the capabilities of the programming language that makes up the vast majority of their systems and applications. In short – it’s time to start viewing COBOL as an asset. As COBOL evolves, it continues to thrive alongside the latest technologies to ensure that core existing applications can benefit from the interoperability of object orientation, XML and service oriented architecture (SOA).”

Micro Focus has also already implemented COBOL/XML support across Windows, UNIX and Linux, which provides natural COBOL syntax, and enables COBOL applications to create, consume and update XML documents that can be shared with other systems regardless of platform and language.

The standards committee has based their proposed future COBOL XML technical report on the innovative support already provided by Micro Focus as part of its latest COBOL development and deployment solutions.

Extending COBOL based applications with Micro Focus enables organizations to cost-effectively re-use original code containing valuable business logic, retain and develop their existing programming skill sets, and migrate to easy-to-maintain, modern IT environments.