Exploiting the platform conundrum - Part 2

In November's In Focus, we looked at how corporate IT is increasing its demand and platform decisions are being based on more exacting requirements. Hardware vendors must work hard to retain market share, as do application providers in the face of growing choice and competition. End-users are seeking to preserve the IT solutions that underpin their business processes and provide their uniqueness. The new business-centric view of IT means that companies demand more flexibility than ever.

So where to start? Well the worried IT director should first review the functionality needed by the business. The next step is to identify appropriate platforms on which to host required business systems, which will involve complex decision criteria and price/performance comparisons. This is by no means a simple decision due to the choices now available: we can select from mainframes, UNIX and Linux boxes, mid-range systems and PCs. Then consider also choices of environments, databases, TP systems, languages and packages, variants of UNIX or Linux, competitive chip architectures, the enterprise-scale Microsoft environment, the IBM iSeries, and the Apple world. Options abound!

Ideally, the end user wants to be able to freely select both the application and the platform according to the needs of their business. However, with such an array of platforms available, it’s a real challenge for application providers to deliver the full range of functionality across each platform. They know only too well that what seems to end users like an entirely reasonable request – to be able to continue to use their current application but simply swap the platform on which it is hosted – is far more challenging in practice for the application provider.

Now let me share with you a well-kept industry secret that could really make a difference to you –applications built using Micro Focus technology are intrinsically portable by nature and the reason for this is both very simple and very clever. Thirty years of industry leadership and significant technological investment means that Micro Focus has been able to carefully shape both the COBOL language standard and its own implementation of that language across its product range. Fundamentally, we uphold the portability of the COBOL application – irrespective of product or platform attributes. This means that if you are building standard COBOL applications, the effort you have to go through to have your application work on a new platform is minimal: you simply recompile and go.

Micro Focus’ open approach and architecture in support of the COBOL language, combined with significant feedback and insight from our ISV customers, mean that the Micro Focus application development solution provides a very portable application portfolio across a range of platforms. We regard our flagship Micro Focus Studio for ISV suite as the industry-specific tailored solution to the platform proliferation conundrum.

For example, you might think that in the mainframe environment, due to the interdependency of COBOL with the likes of CICS, IMS, DB2, JCL and other mainframe software, re-platforming such systems is particularly problematic. It doesn’t have to be. Take, for example, the experience of CSC FSG in the US and Gjensidige in Scandinavia, both of which took their original mainframe-targeted application (developed using Micro Focus technology) and successfully completed the switch to a multi-platform offering of the same application. This presents a fantastic opportunity for mainframe application vendors to explore brand new market possibilities. Even brand-new platforms are viable, as illustrated by Micro Focus client ABK Systeme GmbH, which completed a port of its existing applications to zSeries Linux.

You can’t have escaped the cacophony surrounding service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services, but do these technologies really resolve the platform wars by abstracting everything out? Conceptually, yes. But ‘plumbing’ (the messaging framework) is still needed in the form of XML, WSDL, SOAP and so on. The good news is that if Web services and SOA are part of your application development strategy then Micro Focus can help you deliver it, plumbing included, as the Micro Focus Studio family supports the rapid creation of Web service or SOA incarnations of existing COBOL applications.

Application portability is fast becoming a fact of doing business in the fast moving application market. Vendors that can’t efficiently and cost-effectively support a target platform will soon find themselves trailing those that can. Using Micro Focus technology will assist you in not only staying ahead of the technology curve, but also in turning the problem of platform proliferation into a genuine business opportunity. In Focus readers are invited to send their comments on this article and related issues, by emailing feedback@microfocus.com.