The Micro Focus COBOL products are the engine for modern business, and a key part of our business is supplying development tools and run time systems for hundreds of ISVs that supply their solutions to tens of thousands of customers that provide systems to billions of people worldwide.

The development teams at Micro Focus have been hard at work to produce the next generation of solutions for our COBOL customers and we unveiled the latest developments to sixty key ISVs at our North American ISV event in Las Vegas 8-10 December.

The solution roadmap allows new and compelling ways that COBOL developers can

• Modernize the user interface (Using the forthcoming "Solar UI"). Modernize the core logic (with powerful analysis and development tools)

• Modernize the development process (with Visual Studio, Eclipse as IDEs and the Remote Development Option)

• Modernize the Platform (including Azure, Amazon EC2/S3 and Windows 7)

• Modernize the business model (using Software as a service and cloud)

Delegates saw demonstrations of the prototype User Interface Systems that will allow all our users, whether Net Express, Server Express, extend or RM/COBOL to move to new UI technologies such as WPF in .NET, Silverlight or other Web 2.0 technologies.

ISVs were shown COBOL in the Cloud which enables them to offer their solutions as SaaS, reducing their costs, increasing their "share of wallet" and enabling them to enter new markets.  They were shown how the new testing and analysis tools can help reduce overheads whilst improving software quality and give them even more business agility to meet their customers’ needs.

On the last day, delegates were given "sneak peek" into our development labs, given under NDA this session allowed Micro Focus to show the very newest developments from our developers (sorry, but these can’t be divulged here).

If you would like more details about our COBOL roadmap please download now, and if you would like an opportunity to find out more about the research and development projects that will fuel the next stage of the roadmap, please email peter.anderton@microfocus.com