The creation of a new alliance to enable the migration of critical proprietary mainframe systems onto the Microsoft Windows operating system using Microsoft .NET technology has been announced by Micro Focus International Ltd and Microsoft.
The alliance, which lays the technology foundation to move application workloads from the mainframe to more modern Intel architecture and the Windows Server platform, aims to help customers reduce the high cost of maintaining and modernising their aging mainframe environments.
"Redeploying mainframe legacy assets to newer, cheaper platforms saves time and money," said Mark Cooper, managing director of MigrationWare, distributor of Micro Focus in South Africa.
"Costs can be reduced by up to 50% when moving IT operations to an equivalent Windows platform - a critical business decision for organisations as it provides a low cost, strategic platform to leverage critical value from their existing IT assets. Customers have also reported improved performance, enabling them to improve key business processes without significant additional investment.
"Organisations increasingly realise that they need to re-use rather than replace their existing mainframe applications," said Cooper. "This alliance will help enterprise users take a more cost-effective and reliable approach to the task of migrating applications to the Windows platform than the expensive and risk-prone `rip and replace` approach that was the vogue in the late 1990s."
Micro Focus Enterprise Server, with its new Mainframe Transaction Option, underpins the new platform alliance and now enables the migration and deployment of CICS/COBOL mainframe applications to the Windows platform. Enterprise Server offers the most rapid and lowest-risk way of re-hosting mainframe applications on Windows. Once the application has been re-hosted, it can be extended more easily and effectively through the use of the .NET Framework, SQL Server 2000, XML and Web services.
Most mainframe customers have made substantial investments that support key business processes. However, to remain competitive and deliver more value per application dollar, CIOs and technology managers face mandates to reduce these costs and drive business agility by migrating CICS/COBOL applications to a more modern and extensible platform. Customers can obtain a significant increase in their flexibility and ability to respond to business changes by migrating off the mainframe.
"The opportunity to work with world-class partners implementing enterprise-scale technology for customers is very important to Microsoft," said Danny Naidoo, director: Developer and Platforms Group, Microsoft South Africa. "Our relationship with Micro Focus helps customers move monolithic and expensive mainframe systems to the more agile Microsoft platform."
"Micro Focus recognises the significant investments made by many organisations in legacy applications and the challenges faced by enterprises as they evaluate approaches for deriving further value from those investments," said Cooper. "Working with partners, we are committed to providing the most reliable modernisation strategy for organisations to unlock the value of their legacy systems."
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Micro Focus is the leading provider of COBOL application development and deployment software for contemporary platforms and architectures. Distributed in SA by MigrationWare, Micro Focus enables organisations to unlock the value of their legacy by reusing their business-critical assets, resulting in reduced costs, increased agility and minimal risk. For further information contact MigrationWare on (021) 447 6570 or visit www.migrationware.com.
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