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Mari Melguizo
LEWIS PR
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marim@lewispr.com
3.11.08
TITLE GUARANTY OF HAWAII SURFS THROUGH SOA TRANSITION WITH MICRO FOCUS
Micro Focus enables Title Guaranty to reuse COBOL business logic embedded across 5,000 programs and over three million lines of code to dramatically cut costs and achieve record development time
NEWBURY, England, and MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, March 11, 2008— Micro Focus (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, today announced that Title Guaranty of Hawaii, Inc., the largest title and escrow service company in Hawaii, has successfully incorporated a service oriented architecture (SOA) environment to join and enhance its existing systems and COBOL-based applications. Using Micro Focus Studio for COBOL Developers 4.0, which combines Micro Focus Net Express® and Micro Focus Server Express™, Title Guaranty was able to integrate business processes, third party validation tools and existing COBOL programs accessing critical business data – some of it over 100 years old – with efficient Web services. The integration involved 5,000 programs and over three million lines of code.
By moving to a SOA environment, Title Guaranty has saved 75 “person years” that would have come with a “rip and replace” conversion. Recognizing early on that Web-based services for the end user would quickly become a real estate industry standard, Title Guaranty launched an interactive Website to enable realtors, lenders, attorneys and developers to open, track and close real estate transactions online. Thousands of users have access to this site 24 hours a day and rely on timely, updated information on their orders, correspondence, documents, schedules and more.
Micro Focus works closely with Title Guaranty to keep the interactive Website and back-end systems updated in real time by joining existing programs written in COBOL with Windows applications seamlessly. With the number of users increasing monthly, the scalability provided by Micro Focus’ SOA environment is critical. Now Title Guaranty can concentrate on the future, to continually be on the leading edge of technology in its line of business and go beyond its clients’ expectations.
In addition to the interactive site, Title Guaranty maintains a Title Plant Plat Book System established in 1957 and a computerized, automated Title Plant, effective as of 1986. A majority of this information, which consists of all the documents recorded at the State of Hawaii Bureau of Conveyances since 1986 to the present, the recorded documents and grantor/grantee indices from the mid-1800s to the present, and current maps from the Tax Assessor’s Office, is maintained in Title Guaranty’s existing systems. Micro Focus enables Title Guaranty to bring this data into modernized, flexible business processes.
“We aimed to have our Web applications updated and to make accessing our business-critical data a smoother business process between all of our platforms and systems. Micro Focus provided such a strong infrastructure and support that our developers are now able to close jobs within a few days – a significant improvement,” said Debby Okata, senior systems engineer, Corporate Information Systems division. “The success we’ve seen in reusing embedded business logic on any of our platforms allows us to concentrate on the future business needs of Title Guaranty today and not years from now. Without Micro Focus, we would have spent significantly more time and money over the past few years working on reinventing the wheel in COBOL and not being able to meet our clients’ immediate needs in a timely manner.”
Title Guaranty’s modernization process included over 789,000 records that needed addresses validated in a special download of real property tax information. Micro Focus worked with Title Guaranty to verify its SOA and Web services proof of concept and quickly move it into development, testing and finally deployed to production. Now, Title Guaranty can seamlessly access a Windows address validation tool by using a Windows Web service called from a COBOL program. As a result, Title Guaranty significantly reduced the development and testing time of the initial project and it avoided six to ten months of additional resources and costs associated with developing an address validation feature in a COBOL application.
“Title Guaranty understands the business value that results in analyzing existing IT assets. Rather than beginning a project from scratch, a very time and cost-intensive process, the company was able to leverage the systems and applications that already work best,” said Kevin Moultrup, President, North America Operations, Micro Focus. “Our relationship with Title Guaranty began in 1990 and we’re happy to continue maintaining and modernizing its IT infrastructure as its business and Web-based services continue to grow.”
As Title Guaranty continues to innovate and develop more services for its systems, Micro Focus will provide the application management and modernization tools it needs to accomplish future goals. Title Guaranty plans to add Micro Focus Server for SOA and upgrade to Micro Focus Studio for COBOL Developers 5.0 through 2009. Micro Focus will enable Title Guaranty to access business logic, continue job process flow, update legacy data smoothly, efficiently, and cost effectively regardless of what system (Windows or COBOL) the data is located on or how the data is stored.
“We greatly value the support and services provided by Micro Focus as it has enabled us to smoothly and cost-effectively move to a SOA environment. Micro Focus goes beyond providing just technology and training to extend legacy systems, and has treated us as a partner, not just a client,” said Jerry Opedal, PMO Manager, Title Guaranty of Hawaii, Inc.
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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All product names are registered trademarks of Micro Focus. Other products mentioned in this announcement are trademarks of their respective owners.
