Micro Focus

COBOL System Integration

"We need to lower costs and improve efficiency with better process and system integration"

The existing COBOL applications are operating well within current infrastructure but there are new integration requirements like:

  • We need our applications to work on more cost effective, more contemporary system environments that better meet the needs of the business today
  • We have to support the strategic server consolidation initiatives while integrating COBOL applications with other bespoke and packaged applications
  • There is a target enterprise architecture defined to best suit our strategy and all future applications must deploy onto this architecture so me can operate efficiently and maximize integration of our applications      

Servicing requirements via re-use

All of these types of requirements can be satisfied most effectively by re-using COBOL.

With Micro Focus, any COBOL application can deployed and run incredibly fast on any cost effective, contemporary platform including

  • Any 32/64-bit Windows environment, on any hardware platform, including Windows, Windows .NET and Windows POS
  • Any 32/64-bit UNIX environment, on any hardware platform, including IBM AIX, HP-UX and SUN Solaris
  • Any 32/64-bit Linux environment, on any hardware platform, including Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux and IBM zLinux.      

Any COBOL application can also be integrated with any bespoke internal application or any packaged application due to breadth of integration support provided by Micro Focus such as

  • Cross language interoperability support the enables COBOL application to call and be called from other languages like VB, C, C# and Java while handling data type conversions
  • Object Oriented (OO) COBOL support facilities that enable COBOL applications to invoke and be invoked from other OO languages while handling data type conversions
  • XML support facilities to enable COBOL applications to read and write XML and integrate with any other applications using XML as an integration capability      

Micro Focus has continually innovated to ensure COBOL can be integrated as a first class citizen in all popular enterprise architectures and today we provide the following

  • Support for Microsoft enterprise application architectures and application servers including COM, .NET and IIS support
  • Support for Java enterprise application architectures including J2EE and Java application servers including IBM WebSphere, Oracle Application Server 10g (Oracle), Sun Java System Application Server, BEA Web Logic and JBoss.
  • Web services support for COBOL to enable COBOL applications to consume and be consumed as Web services while handling data type conversions      

Much of the above support also provides the basis for existing COBOL code to be deployed as services with a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) if your have made the strategic decision to deploy a SOA.

Given existing COBOL code can run on Windows, UNIX or Linux and can fully interoperate with other languages, it really makes no business sense to consider re-writing existing COBOL systems to fulfil any integration requirement. Using the COBOL re-use approach you can deliver the better results but in a fraction of the time, with minimum effort and dramatically reduced risk.