z/OS Application Modernization

The Contemporary Mainframe

While the economy shows signs of long-term improvement, market conditions continue to put pressure on every organization’s costs. At the same time businesses are seeking to deliver more value per dollar.

To lower costs and drive business agility at lower risk, modernizing critical IBM Mainframe applications is becoming more important for the following reasons:

• To remain competitive, organizations must create and deliver new business value based on innovative use of IT 
• A history of investment in, and reliance on, people, processes and technology has resulted in core applications which hinder innovation and progress
• Organizations have come to understand the high cost and risk associated with replacing core applications with packages or custom-built alternatives  

The z/OS Modernization Strategy:

Modernization  provides a proven path to allow organizations to re-use people, processes and technology as they seek to enhance existing application portfolios with reduced cost, and extend them to support the needs of the future with lowered risk and enhanced flexibility. Micro Focus offers industry-leading development environments for development of IBM Mainframe applications, supporting organizations with a strategic commitment to the mainframe, but who wish to enhance and extend existing systems to meet the demands of the business. 

Industry strength technology for the assessment and execution of mainframe modernization projects, Micro Focus Enterprise View, Micro Focus SOA Express and Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition, allow organizations to directly tackle major business issues of operational efficiencies, governance and compliance, system consolidation and cost management, supporting not only tried and trusted mainframe systems such as COBOL, CICS and IMS,but also allowing a rapid deployment into SOA through the plaform of choice including WebSphere and J2EE. 

z/OS Modernization Results:

Strategic Investment and Commitment: Organizations with a significant investment in core systems understand the profound importance of those applications to the business, as well as the unnecessary risk of replacing these systems. Micro Focus’ 30 year history and commitment to mainframe systems and our Global2000 customers ensures that organizations can rely on a single vendor to provide development and extension capabilities no matter what the environment.

Cost Reduction: Micro Focus provides existing developers with the most productive workstation-based environment for all aspects of mainframe application delivery, including code generation, analysis, development, extension, debugging and testing. Application delivery is faster than ever before, yielding high availability and quality. By improving application turnaround time and removing the burden of maintenance tasks from the mainframe, IT costs on core infrastructure and even software will be greatly reduced, and production platform power refocused on running business-critical production systems.

Reduced Risk: Micro Focus dramatically reduces ongoing risks by providing a complete, familiar and unified environment for all application delivery. Removing organizational fragmentation will improve the flexibility and availability of IT skills, and therefore operational efficiency. Micro Focus’ support of open standards, together with capabilities to extend existing business processes into new architectures, further minimizes risk by removing dependencies on outmoded or proprietary technology, and motivates programming teams with a best-in-class, contemporary development platform. 

Increased Agility: Micro Focus also benefits organizations needing to extend functionality. By helping improve time-to-market of application maintenance and modernization projects, Micro Focus tools free up key staff to work on strategic initiatives such as SOA enablement, Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley. These tools include capabilities to allow COBOL programmers to quickly and easily extend core systems using SOA architectures into J2EE, .NET or Web Services, without changing the original code, or having to learn new architectures. This further improves organizational dexterity by delivering proven business value into new channels.

z/OS application modernization results in applications that are:

• Lower-cost (TCO of hardware and software is reduced)
• More open and maintainable
• Agile and adaptable 
• Extensible to the internet, WebSphere, J2EE, XML and Web Services
• Fully exploited through continued re-use   

Summary

Uniquely created to run your business, your core systems are a major corporate asset. By allowing you to modernize, while at the same time reducing cost and risk, Micro Focus allows you to maximize the value of your core applications to meet the needs of the future. Micro Focus' unified environments for application development significantly reduce risks and costs, and offer improved business agility through extension to J2EE and Web Services. Aligning IT to the business with improved application delivery will yield a substantial ROI.