Micro Focus today announced the general availability of Visual COBOL 7.0 and Enterprise Suite 7.0, providing flexible application, process and infrastructure modernization solutions for COBOL and mainframe systems. As organizations seek to deliver on IT strategies through modernization and digital transformation initiatives, Micro Focus Visual COBOL and Enterprise Suite 7.0 represent a decade of sustained investment that builds on the company’s more than 40 years of experience in modernizing business-critical applications running on the mainframe or distributed environments.
“This latest release reinforces our commitment to our customers by delivering proven, robust solutions that protect their investments and enables them to meet the changing business expectations while taking advantage of new environments and infrastructures,” said Neil Fowler, General Manager of Application Modernization and Connectivity at Micro Focus. “Through the integration of application security with Micro Focus Fortify, the expansion of deployment options and the addition of new development tools for delivering contemporary mainframe-based systems, these Micro Focus solutions give developers new ways to work with long-standing enterprise applications while delivering on a modernization strategy.”
As the market leader in the COBOL and PL/I application modernization space, Micro Focus’ customer success and continued evolution in Visual COBOL and Enterprise Suite 7.0 are centered on the following:
- Protect the investment customers have already made in their core business systems by allowing them to continue running with the same integrity, quality and performance while also providing the flexibility to deploy these systems onto new platforms and take advantage of new technologies.
- New in 7.0: IDE access to Visual Studio Code for COBOL development provides agile modern development tooling focused at delivering application change faster while also attracting new developers to maintain these core business systems.
- Extend and continually modernize applications by identifying the business processes that can be automatically extracted using code slicing technologies, as well as repurposing business functions by exposure through REST APIs or delivery as microservices deployed onto distributed, mainframe, container or Cloud platforms.
- New in 7.0: A recently published resource enabling COBOL application modernization with Java and Cloud technologies, entitled: “Visual COBOL” New application modernization tools for Java Developers”
- New in 7.0: Integration with Micro Focus Fortify to give developers and application security professionals the ability to quickly scan code for vulnerabilities and provide unique support for the COBOL language across both Micro Focus COBOL and mainframe-based applications.
- Enable a move of mainframe COBOL and PL/I applications to the cloud with compatibility that ensures minimal change and reduced risk while preserving core business functionality. Scalability and serviceability allows applications and data to scale out elastically on lower-cost commodity cloud infrastructure but retain the same or better level reliability and continuous operations seen on the mainframe.
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- New in 7.0: Mainframe data can be hosted on Oracle (including catalog, VSAM and spool files) with extended support for highly available and shared data when scaling out to cloud platforms. As an alternative to Redis when scaling Enterprise Server in a Performance and Availability Cluster, the update also includes a preview of Oracle Coherence support.
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- New in 7.0: Security enhancements to the Enterprise Server internal password Vault system to support the use of Hashicorp plus improved security and usability of Data File Editor when managing production data files.
“When we rolled out the re-platformed application with Micro Focus Visual COBOL, we actually saw an overall performance boost of more than 20 percent,” said Chuck Wainscott, Director of Architecture, FIS asset management group. “Not only are our processes running faster, but we can scale out and run more concurrent processes.”
Recent research shows that application modernization must be continuous and evolving in order to meet the changing needs of today’s business climate. Digital transformation demands a flexible and adaptive strategy aimed at improving results and accelerating time to value. Through the Micro Focus Modernization Maturity Model, IT leaders can quickly map their current IT estate to their future business strategy—all while finding the right balance between cost, risk and speed.
