Micro Focus Announces .Net Interoperability to Complement Cobol/Java Support in Net Express 3.1

Business Wire, Sept 10, 2001

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

NEWBURY, United Kingdom and ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Sept. 10, 2001

New functionality enables companies to use COBOL

business logic in e-business applications

Micro Focus International Ltd. (Micro Focus(R)), a leading global enterprise development company for legacy systems, today announced further enhancements to its popular Net Express(R) product for developing and extending distributed COBOL applications to the Web. Increasing the return-on-investment in legacy systems, this groundbreaking development environment now supports interoperability with Microsoft .NET technologies in addition to the COBOL/Java interoperability introduced in Net Express 3.1.

.NET is an environment for developing and running software applications that offers rich standard run-time services available to components written in a variety of programming languages, and inter-language and inter-machine interoperability.

Net Express provides the only scalable alternative to running COBOL systems on the mainframe, offering companies a low-risk, cost-effective means of leveraging their legacy assets in an e-business environment. By implementing Net Express, companies can maximize reuse of existing IBM mainframe and proprietary platform COBOL applications, enabling them to participate in e-business applications across the enterprise. In addition, companies can now transform core business applications written in COBOL and extend them to the Web and other distributed platforms, including UNIX and Windows.

A key feature of Net Express is its ability to create COM components in COBOL that can then be accessed by other applications to build cross-technology applications. Utilizing this support, Net Express provides a high level of interoperability with the .NET framework, especially in the areas that are most important to COBOL programmers.

"With 85 percent of the world's business data accessed from COBOL, companies are struggling with ways to transform legacy code into evolving e-business applications which guarantee that customers, suppliers and partners can access, interact and benefit from this existing data," said Ian Archbell, vice president and director of product management of Micro Focus. "Net Express provides an unmatched solution for leveraging a company's legacy investment and programming resources to reduce the development cycle and accelerate the deployment of new applications."

In addition to Net Express' ability to interact with .NET, its support of COBOL/Java interoperability allows users to construct mixed language applications, which make the business rules, represented in COBOL applications available to e-business systems written in Java. With Net Express Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) wrapping, COBOL assets can be extended to applications running industry-standard application server environments such as IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic.

"Using the Net Express product we were able to easily migrate our mainframe software to a local area network in under six months, enabling us to better track, manage and serve the 3,300 retirees and $1 billion in payroll funds managed for the district," said Lonnie Caldwell, director of technology for the Public School Retirement System of St. Louis. "Net Express is our product of choice based on its proven ability to quickly transform legacy systems into immediate business value."

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus is the industry leader in COBOL development solutions spanning traditional maintenance and program understanding to business rule mining, Web-enablement and user-interface transformation. With 70,000 licensed users at more than 7,000 sites around the world, Micro Focus offers unsurpassed breadth of platform support, performance and scalability, and the most comprehensive suite of development and integration environments to help customers succeed in taking full advantage of the power of their legacy systems. Founded in 1976, Micro Focus is a global company that employs more than 450 people worldwide, with principal offices in the United Kingdom and United States. For more information, visit www.microfocus.com.

Micro Focus and Net Express are registered trademarks of Micro Focus International Ltd. All non-Micro Focus products mentioned in this announcement are property of their respective owners.