Many global organizations rely on application portfolios and core systems written up to half a century ago to serve the needs of the business and support business- critical functions such as payroll, banking, retail services and logistics.
For the modern enterprise, re-using application logic and data technology is good business sense. With the right technology, companies can leverage these applications and create a bridge to new technology such as cloud, mobile and next generation architectures.
This way, companies with heritage IT can still be relevant in the new digital economy. The closer alignment between IBM middleware and our forward-thinking development environment offers new options for companies meeting that profile.
What are the products called and what do they do?
IBM® TXSeries® for Multiplatforms is distributed transaction processing middleware. It supports new and longer-established applications in both cloud environments and traditional data centers. It is a scalable and highly available platform for developing, deploying and hosting mission-critical applications that also integrates with mixed-language, multiplatform and service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments.
Micro Focus Visual COBOL
Visual COBOL is a powerful development environment for COBOL applications. By integrating with Eclipse and Visual Studio, Visual COBOL enables a new age of application innovation, with unrivalled portability and performance for distributed COBOL applications. Smart editing features, multi-platform compilation and advanced debugging tools ensure that modernizing your COBOL applications through Visual COBOL is simple and straightforward. It supports a wide range of the latest environments including Cloud, mobile, .NET and JVM.
How do they work together?
Modern enterprises deploying these two solutions together will be enabling their application developers to leverage long-established and unique business logic and data while bridging the gap between old and the new. Business-critical applications written in C, C++, COBOL, Java and PL/I can be deployed across an array of on premise, virtual and cloud platforms. Enterprise organizations will be able to develop mission-critical applications with high scalability, fast performance and 24×7 availability.
What does it all mean?
Because the IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms V8.2 now supports Micro Focus Visual COBOL, developers can now build, test and deploy enterprise COBOL applications using modern IDEs – Visual Studio or Eclipse – that are seamlessly integrated within Micro Focus Visual COBOL.
The tighter integration between Micro Focus Visual COBOL and IBM TXSeries is highly streamlined and validated through a simple ‘single step command’ within the Install Verification Programs (IVP) process. Adoption is further streamlined by providing CICS and COBOL sample applications ‘out-of-the-box’ for easy reference and integration.
Perhaps more significantly, internal test simulations suggest this tighter alignment will deliver a powerful 40% improvement in COBOL application performance. Application developers are more enabled than ever before to optimize application services for business users.
So, good news, right?
Right. “We’re very excited about this new integration capability between IBM and Micro Focus. This new solution further demonstrates our shared partner commitment to the ongoing support of enterprise business applications. Visual COBOL’s certification with IBM TXSeries provides our mutual customers with new development capability, a wide array of platform options and unrivaled performance.” (me! That’s Ed Airey, Micro Focus and you can find me on Twitter)
Right. “It is always our priority to bring together the best in class experience for our application development and management teams. With support for Visual COBOL we have taken our user experience to the next level by providing a well-integrated, seamless development and deployment of COBOL apps to our enterprise-grade platform. ” (Kasturi Mohan, IBM)
Learn more about IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms V8.2 here and start your journey to innovation with Micro Focus Visual COBOL from here.
