Creative University Students Awarded for Innovative Use of COBOL Programming Technology

-- Micro Focus announces three winners of the GRACIE Competition 2001 --

ORLANDO, Fla., October 9, 2001 - Micro Focus International Ltd. (Micro Focus®), a leading global enterprise development company for legacy systems, today announced at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo winners of this year's Admiral Grace Murray Hopper Student Programming Competition, or GRACIE Competition. This competition recognizes students that creatively used COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) technology in real-world scenarios to solve application development challenges. Winners were selected by an independent panel of academic judges in computer science and included student and faculty advisors from Robert Morris College in Moon Twp., Pa. and the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, Tx. Student winners were each awarded a cash prize of $1,000 and the sponsoring faculty member receives a choice of computer hardware.

This year's GRACIE's were divided into two categories, one for Net Express, a Web-based COBOL development tool and Personal Cobol, a traditional COBOL development tool for academia. Both of these Micro Focus products support reduction in e-business time-to-market and increase the value of technology investments through the reuse of valuable legacy system assets, including code, data and processes. The market for extending legacy systems is an important one.

According to a recent research note by Gartner, "Organizations that wish to help their enterprises deliver new killer applications and workflows should consider extending legacy systems by employing user interface extension technologies and tools. These tools are easy to learn to use and are able deliver high-payback, low-risk solutions in a short period of time; they should become one of many tools in an IS organization's integration tool box."*

Net Express winners were:

· From Robert Morris College, Drew Hanson of Prosperity, Pa. and James Twigger of McDonald, Pa. Drew is a senior and James is a junior and both completing their degrees in the Computer Information System (CIS) program and were advised by Azad Ali, associate professor of CIS. Their winning entry was an application designed from legacy assets to perform functions as a network information system. The program tracks inventories, employees, phone systems and network information.

The Personal COBOL winner was:

· From the University of Texas - Pan American, Stephen Beckman of Mission, Tx. was recognized for his program, Trinity Records System. Trinity Records System is designed to manage the records of membership, contacts, events, attendance and offerings at a church. Although it is designed for a particular church, it could be customized for any organization. Mr. Beckman is working on his degree in CIS and was advised by Dr. Mohan Rao, associate professor of computer information systems.

The need for continued education in COBOL technology is evidenced by Gartner's estimate that applications managing about 85 percent of the world's business data are written in COBOL. In fact Gartner further estimates that the annual growth of COBOL code over the next four years is 5 billion lines but there will be a 13 percent decrease in the number of COBOL programmers due to retirement and death. With 60 percent of the world's code base still written in COBOL, the need for technology professionals experienced in COBOL will be acute. "Micro Focus is once again proud to sponsor this year's GRACIE Competition," said Dr. Tony Hill, president and chief executive officer. "We are committed to supporting information systems education in COBOL as a foundation for computer and business learning. The innovative work of these students is a credit to each one of them personally and these respected institutions."

About the GRACIE Award

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College when the U.S. Navy recruited her in 1943 to work on the first computer in the United States, the Mark 1, at Harvard University. During the course of her work, Admiral Hopper created and standardized many key technical developments - most notably COBOL - the business programming language used from the earliest computer to the newest microchip. This year celebrates the 41st anniversary of the development of COBOL.

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus is the industry leader in COBOL development solutions spanning traditional maintenance and program understanding to business rule mining, Web-enablement and user-interface transformation. With 70,000 licensed users at more than 7,000 sites around the world, Micro Focus offers unsurpassed breadth of platform support, performance and scalability, and the most comprehensive suite of development and integration environments to help customers succeed in taking full advantage of the power of their legacy systems. Founded in 1976, Micro Focus is a global company that employs more than 450 people worldwide, with principal offices in the United Kingdom and United States. For more information, visit www.microfocus.com.

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Micro Focus and Net Express are registered trademarks of Micro Focus International Ltd. All non-Micro Focus products mentioned in this announcement are property of their respective owners.