FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MICRO FOCUS ACCEPTED INTO THE IBM SOA SPECIALTY

-Service Oriented Architecture Approach Drives Business Agility and Flexibility-

ROCKVILLE, Md., May 2, 2007 - Micro Focus (Micro Focus®, LSE: MCRO.L), a leader in enterprise application management and modernization solutions, today announced its acceptance as an IBM Business Partner for the SOA Specialty after meeting IBM's technical, education and business requirements. With this achievement, Micro Focus' Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition integrates with the IBM software and strategy for SOA.

"SOA is an increasingly important business requirement for organizations because of the business flexibility it enables," said Sandy Carter, vice president, SOA and WebSphere, IBM Software Group. "Micro Focus' commitment to SOA provides their customers with a powerful way to reduce development costs while rapidly deploying operational, fully modernized applications."

Mainframe Express, Micro Focus' unified environment for mainframe development is the industry's leading technology for creating, maintaining and testing COBOL, CICS and IMS applications. Adding compliance with SOA standards enables Mainframe Express to immediately link to all IBM software and strategy for SOA. The results are reduced project times and complexity coupled with accelerated adoption of IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. The key to innovation and operational excellence in business is in using existing resources.

"Having already successfully tested in the same technological framework ourselves, we are delighted that Micro Focus and IBM are working together around our SOA efforts", said Steve Wiggins, chief information officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina. "Since Micro Focus and IBM technologies are central to our SOA strategy, this integration is an important positive step for us."

"Support for SOA is critical to reducing the cost and time to deployment for business-critical mainframe applications," said Stuart McGill, chief technology officer at Micro Focus. "IBM software and strategy for SOA provides our joint customers with a best-of-breed development platform for solving business challenges".

About Micro Focus
Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers' business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com.

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Micro Focus and Mainframe Express are registered trademarks of Micro Focus. All other products and companies mentioned in this announcement are trademarks of their respective organizations.