Benefits
Customer Quotes
We wanted to minimize re-training, knowing we were going into an entirely new domain, and also plan for ongoing maintenance. Our skills lie in COBOL, our existing systems are in COBOL, and Net Express was the obvious way forward for us.
George Cowe, Technical Specialist
Abbey National Financial and Investment Services
Net Express and Revolve expedite the migration process with our clients. They cut in half the time needed to migrate, compile and test code. Micro Focus has been, and will continue to be, a critical component to the success of our business.
Sandy Allinson, President
Allinson-Ross Corporation
The performance of Net Express has really impressed me. The application used to take between 20 to 40 minutes to run on the mainframe. With the new system it takes just 20 seconds. This is a tremendous increase in productivity and also means that any backlog in orders can be quickly addressed. It’s good to have that peace of mind.
Alison Richards, Developer
BCA (Book Club Associates)
Micro Focus has modernized our COBOL time and time again, and turned it into a high-tech solution, giving us the right tools to face the future.
Roger Engel, Vice President & Head of IT Development
Deutsche Bank Luxembourg
[Net Express] is a powerful productivity tool that was not matched by the other offering
John West, Manager Application Delivery, Information Services Branch, Corporate Services Division
DoIR
This is really an impressive migration - the cost savings we have experienced since migrating off the mainframe have been exceptional. In the last full year of using the mainframe, we were paying £830,000 for leasing and maintenance.
Simon Cohen, Development Manager
Express Newspapers
In the banking industry it’s vitally important that mission-critical systems are robust and highly available. Over the last half a century COBOL has proven its reliability and stability for such core transactional and business systems. Now with tools from Micro Focus, COBOL is able to embrace, and integrate fully with modern frameworks such as .NET. This allows organizations to ‘do more with less’ and harness their solid investments in legacy systems while also moving forward into current and evolving architectures
Dean Mathieson, Product Development Manager
Financial Network Services (FNS)
We sometimes hear of COBOL dying out, but I disagree, Using Net Express we could easily translate our core COBOL data to XML. That made it really easy and fast to integrate our system in a non-invasive way with the existing system of BMW and others. With functionality like XML support built in to the language, and utilities available to automate the creation of copybooks from XML schemas, I see no limitations in COBOL whatsoever.
Daniel Liljebladh, CIO
FordonsData Nordic AB
This was a lifesaver for us. The pressure was on to implement Internet development for our major systems. Net Express enabled us to get going immediately, with the knowledge that it would be completed well within our timeframe.
Carol McCready, Heywood Development Director
Heywood Limited
Net Express and Server Express expedite the migration process with our clients. They significantly reduce the time needed to analyze, migrate, compile and test code. Micro Focus has been, and will continue to be, a critical component to the success of our business
Alexander (Sandy) Allinson, CEO
Inglenet Business Solutions
The initial transition to .NET is on the server side, and we have found Net Express with .NET easy to use and focused on helping us reuse what we have within the .NET Framework. The only challenge is where we have made use of OO base class libraries such as ordered collections as these are not managed code, we will take this opportunity to implement these as .NET classes instead. However, since Net Express with .NET provides COM interoperability support, this can be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, saving the need to completely re-write certain components that rely on Micro Focus OO base class library.
Simon Hart, Senior Programmer
McGuffie Brunton
Thanks to the Micro Focus solution it is possible to reuse, modernize and extend our existing COBOL code to evolve with the most recent technologies. We are also saving on additional training costs for our IT staff since we are able to maintain COBOL as our core platform...
Francis Dries, Director of HR Application Development
Ministry of Finance
If your capacity requirements are modest you should look at your options. It won’t make sense to migrate away from the mainframe in all circumstances, but it will in some
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The IBM mainframe isn’t just alive, its kicking. Rumors of the mainframe’s demise over the past decade are most politely described as ‘exaggerated’. The mainframe will continue to thrive and evolve well into the next decade and beyond. As it stands a huge proportion of the world’s commercial and financial transactions take place on the mainframe, and many applications that perform those transactions are written using venerable programming languages like Cobol and PL/1. Indeed, while Java has been enormously influential as a web technology, it represents a tiny drop in compared to the ocean of ‘legacy’ that lies deep at the heart of the world’s financial institutions, airlines and governments. The number of transactions that mainframes process continues to grow at around 5% a year and demand for mainframe capacity is growing a little over 20% a year.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The number of enquiries that we’re getting from our clients about the viability of the mainframe platform, mainframe migration and the future of Cobol has grown significantly in the past 12 months.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
In general terms, the mainframe is fit and well. Brand-new mainframe MIPS shipments (as opposed to replacement MIPS) continue to grow by around 15% a year, and the number of lines of Cobol code in production continues to grow by between 3% and 5%. The mainframe isn’t going to disappear tomorrow; indeed, we expect mainframes to be in production well into the next decade at least.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
While the number of deployed MIPS is set to grow, the number of deployed mainframes will decline. Essentially, at the high-end, mainframes are getting bigger while at the low-end a significant number of smaller mainframes will be switched off.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
Over the next five years smaller mainframes will come under intense pressure from x86-based (Intel and AMD) platforms as their price/performance improvements out-pace the mainframes by a significant margin. The price/performance gap is still widening, despite the excellent progress that IBM has made with the mainframe.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
Cobol remains the most widely deployed programming language in big business, accounting for 75% of all computer transactions – and it is not going to go away. Cobol is pervasive in the financial sector (accounting for 90% of all financial transactions), in defence, as well as within established manufacturing and insurance sectors. We estimate that there are over 200 billion lines of Cobol in production today, and this number continues to grow by between three and five percent a year.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The cost of mainframe hardware is still very high; in many cases Intel/AMD-based hardware is ten-times less expensive.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The reliability of non-mainframe platforms is closing on the mainframe, and technologies that used to be the preserve of the mainframe (notably virtualisation) are now ‘crossing over’ to the world of Intel and AMD.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
Over the next five years the number of individual mainframes will decline by around one third. However, the total number of deployed mainframe MIPS will rise by at least 10% annually over the same period.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
We believe that the small mainframe (sub-500 MIPS) is an endangered species. We expect the number of mainframes in the tiny and small categories to decline significantly over the next five years.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The mainframe migration market will grow gradually over the forecast period, peaking in 2009 before beginning to fall off.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
Micro Focus and Microsoft have helped us position INGENIUM to a wider range of customers without sacrificing the security or scalability we enjoy on the mainframe version, which many of our customers continue to use. It truly is the best of both worlds.
Blair Goulet, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Global Initiatives
SOLCORP
We’ve been using Net Express to migrate portions of our ICL mainframe application to a Windows NT environment. Using Net Express, our own in-house COBOL experts have successfully completed the re-hosting of two key modules effortlessly. We couldn’t be more impressed with the Net Express product. It’s simply miles ahead of the tools our team has been using for the last few years.
Maurice Winn, Systems Manager
Southampton Container Terminals Ltd.
By reusing and unlocking the inherent value of our legacy applications, we can more quickly provide new products and technical innovations for our customers. Partnering with Micro Focus will allow us to take a new approach to delivering the latest solutions with low cost and risk.
Michael Schlag, Head of application development
Sparda-Datenverarbeitung
Micro Focus Net Express® and Server Express™ technology has the performance that Summit Racing Equipment requires. We wanted the best in legacy development and deployment to help us migrate to the latest in hardware technology.
Rich Pierro, Information Technology Manager
Summit Racing
Micro Focus Net Express and Enterprise Server have helped us find the balance between the legacy systems running mission critical applications and the need to extend and deploy these applications with new and emerging technologies like Web services.
Steve DiPaola, Vice President of Retail and Administrative Systems
Valero Energy (USA)
Micro Focus has clearly taken great pains to develop products that not only deliver rich functionality but are also extremely easy to work with. The company has a comprehensive vision for future development in creating their technology, and we would consider working with Micro Focus again on future endeavors.
Joe Mislinski, CIO
Vestcom
Analyst Quotes
Despite years of dire speculation to the contrary, the mainframe is still very much alive. Enterprises still have a tremendous amount of critical business logic and data on mainframes. Regarding rehosting, server consolidation, and other legacy extension initiatives, there is no one right answer to every scenario. However, integration across platforms is essential. Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition provides a robust solution for developing and maintaining mainframe applications with the proper support of newer standards
Ron Exler, Director of Research Operations
Robert Frances Group
