COBOL without barriers

COBOL without barriers

The world’s most powerful, precise and high performance business computing language can now be delivered on whichever deployment platform or framework makes most business sense. COBOL is truly without barriers.

Now you can build and maintain COBOL applications using the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that best suits your needs, including Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for Windows and .NET applications or Eclipse for Windows, UNIX or Linux.

By taking COBOL forward to new platforms like .NET, Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the cloud, you can now deploy a single COBOL source to multiple platforms without changing a single line of code, while delivering powerful GUI experience with latest technologies.

Analyze what you have today and where your focus will drive future improvements

Micro Focus application analysis solutions quickly identify which IT systems make the greatest contribution to business and those that no longer add sufficient value. Highlighting the most pressing development and modernization needs focuses attention, effort and investment where it returns most value. Maintenance costs go down and the productivity of development teams goes up.

Rich technical insight into the inventory and structure of the application portfolio accelerates development tasks by up to 40% and gives business-level perspectives on applications. Development organizations identify the best ways to optimize the cost and agility of core applications, managers scope and plan modernization and development tasks better, and developers understand how to adapt their applications to respond to business requirements.

• Understand the value that each of your mainframe applications deliver and the contribution these make to business.
• Plan the strategic mainframe modernization initiatives to take your business forward.
• Improve quality by measuring and managing change, ensuring that the right return is obtained from streamlining and modernizing applications

Define and manage requirements for stronger software to business alignment

Defining and managing requirements is the bedrock for application development and enhancement. Micro Focus uniquely combines requirements definition, visualization, and management into a single ’3-Dimensional’ solution, giving managers, analysts and developers precise detail for engineering their software. By cutting ambiguity, the direction of development and QA teams is clear, strengthening business outcomes.

For one company this delivered an ROI of 6-8 months, 20% increase in project success rates, 30% increase in productivity and a 25% increase in asset re-use.

Using Micro Focus tools to define and manage requirements helps your teams:

• Collaborate through using pictures to build mindshare, drive a common vision and share responsibility with role-based review and simulations.
• Reduce waste by finding and removing errors earlier in the lifecycle, eliminating ambiguity and streamlining communication.
• Improve quality by taking the business need into account when defining the test plan.

COBOL – designed to ensure business applications meet business demands

Micro Focus compilers and tools enable developers to build, maintain and enhance existing enterprise COBOL applications. Now you can reduce development times using tools such as Visual Studio or Eclipse that offer greater developer productivity, as well as enable you to use other technologies to enhance your COBOL applications,such as WPF, WCF, JavaFX, HTML5, Silverlight etc. seamlessly within the same environment. to enhance your COBOL applications.

Building new enterprise business applications using Micro Focus COBOL means you:

• Reduce costs through modern IDE based tools
• Address skills gaps by using industry standard tools and commodity skills
• Improve competitive advantage as you build powerful composite applications with mixed languages and technologies

Modernizing existing enterprise business applications with Micro Focus COBOL means you:

• Extend the value of business applications by building on existing intellectual capital
• Improve competitive advantage by focusing on what delivers value, not re-creating what you already have
• Innovate through new solutions, new delivery methods and modern User Interfaces.

Test early and often to identify and eliminate expensive to fix defects earlier in the lifecycle

Our highly automated quality tooling is built around visual interfaces and the notion of reusability. Tests can be run frequently and earlier in the development lifecycle with defects caught and eliminated fast. A comprehensive range of testing tools – from functional testing to cloud-based performance testing – allows users to spot and correct weaknesses rapidly across their application portfolio, even for Web 2.0 applications.

• Align testing with a clear, shared understanding of business goals, so you focus test resources and measure what matters
• Increase control through greater visibility over all quality activities
• Improve productivity by testing earlier in the lifecycle, catching and driving out defects faster

Deploy your COBOL applications to more platforms than ever

Performance, accuracy, reliability and portability are the cornerstones of COBOL’s success. Micro Focus has extended this portability to a whole new range of platforms, including .NET and JVM. So you benefit from cost-effective commodity hardware and software. COBOL harnesses the power of modern managed platforms and extends the reach of COBOL applications to mobile, SaaS and cloud-based solutions.

COBOL without barriers means you can deploy your COBOL applications on the platforms that make most business sense, and:

• Reduce cost by capitalizing on the increased performance and cost effectiveness of modern platforms
• Improve competitive advantage by moving existing applications onto new platforms (.NET and JVM) without sacrificing the intellectual capital embedded in your business applications
• Increase business agility by deploying your applications on mobile, as SaaS and in the cloud.