DIE SOFTWARE

About DIE SOFTWARE

DIE SOFTWARE Peter Fitzon GmbH (DIE SOFTWARE) is an independent and international software house providing a comprehensive range of banking and financial solutions. With its product OBS, DIE SOFTWARE ranks as one of the leading core banking providers in Germany and German-speaking Europe.

COBOL has served DIE SOFTWARE very well over decades of building the business and developing new banking services. The COBOL language is continually under development with Micro Focus and DIE SOFTWARE upgraded as new versions became available to give them advanced capabilities. Micro Focus Net Express had been their trusted and proven choice for distributed COBOL application development.

As digital strategies and a more connected world emerged, Micro Focus introduced Visual COBOL, which was a logical next step for DIE SOFTWARE. Using Visual COBOL for Eclipse enabled DIE Software to build a next generation service for its securities offering. By implementing interfaces for SOAP and REST communication with different source systems, Visual COBOL seamlessly connects to Java, which simplifies collaboration with external financial systems.

Sven Oldenburg, CTO at DIE SOFTWARE, comments: “We have decades of COBOL experience within our company and it is great to leverage this in a new and modern development environment, where we work with COBOL and Java. Mixed language debugging helps us find problems fast and we don’t need SOAP or REST expertise because support for this is delivered through Java.”

Visual COBOL supports all platforms required by DIE SOFTWARE and leverages Eclipse as an integrated software development environment. In a relatively small company, all departments tend to work close together towards a common goal anyway, but having Visual COBOL in place improves developer collaboration.

Using Visual COBOL, a real-time online interface was developed, leveraging a SOAP/REST service. Client banks seamlessly connect to this via a SOAP API and can easily request, update, and delete their securities data around the clock. Apart from gaining the obvious benefit of real-time access, Weber highlights another advantage:

DIE SOFTWARE banked on COBOL nearly 35 years ago. Today, the team still reap the benefits of this decision, according to Oldenburg: “Visual COBOL has opened up a new world of connectivity opportunities for us. We can collaborate and integrate with other software providers, delivering value-add to our banking clients.”

Weber concludes: “Reducing data storage requirements and providing real-time access to our securities service was a pressing issue for us. Micro Focus helped us define the solution and deliver it to our clients. We look forward to many more successful collaborations.”