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Company ports COBOL to Windows Azure cloud


By David Worthington
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November 14, 2008 —  From mainframes to “modernized” Web-based front ends, COBOL applications remain mission-critical for many enterprises. Now those same apps have a future in the cloud, says application management tool maker Micro Focus.

The company showed at the Professional Developers Conference a mockup of its Customer Information Control System transaction manager running on Microsoft’s Windows Azure service platform. Porting the CICS transaction manager to Azure lets COBOL applications move to the cloud, said Micro Focus' CTO Mark Haynie.

That’s possible because the APIs between COBOL applications and the CICS transaction manager are well defined, he said. “We layer those [APIs] on top of Azure, so [the transaction manager] works the same running in Azure and on premises, allowing for the reuse of COBOL business logic.”

COBOL applications flow from IBM System z servers to on-premises installations of Micro Focus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition, then into the cloud, Haynie said. The objective is to relieve customers of having to modify their code.

Once services are running on Azure, customers have the option of binding them to Microsoft SQL Server instead of IBM’s DB2 Database, as well as running “green screen” terminal emulators for them from Azure, he added.

Haynie is confident that Azure-based applications can be made highly available because Micro Focus intends to layer its own enterprise-level technology on top of the infrastructure provided by Azure. “We pull in additional Micro Focus technology, like our cluster server,” he said.

Micro Focus will adopt a subscription-based pricing model but has not decided the particulars yet, he added. The CICS solution will not ship until Microsoft has completed its work on Azure.

The company served on Microsoft’s cloud service advisory group and began working with the Azure software development kit back when the platform was called Red Dog. Haynie acknowledged that Micro Focus had to overcome a learning curve because Azure is a platform with layers (such as its identity service) that must be invoked to carry out certain operations.

“In many ways, what you learned about .NET and Active Directory APIs goes out the window,” he said. "You have to learn new cloud service API calls. We modified lower layers of engines [such as CICS] to invoke new services in Azure.”




Related Search Term(s): Azure, cloud computing, COBOL, Windows, Micro Focus, Microsoft


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