Stories about: Micro Focus

Last year, Michael Vu, a 40-year-old independent IT consultant, found himself in a wholly unexpected place midway through his career.

Companies looking to get a head-start with an SOA roll-out are being offered a new service from Micro Focus. The company has launched a new product called SOA Express that provides a way for customers to convert the code for existing services.

Health insurance provider, Health Benefits Association (HBA), will slash its operating costs by half a million dollars over the next five years by standardizing its software systems.

Unisys has announced an expansion of its relationship with Oracle to move mainframe and Unix deployments over to Linux and SOA.

Until a few months ago, the clearing and billing system for NYSE Group's stock options exchange consisted of about 800 discrete Cobol programs running on an IBM mainframe. Today, the entire application set has migrated onto a pair of clustered, quadprocessor Windows servers. The recompiled programs remain in Cobol today, but they won't stay there for long.

By some estimates, the total value of the applications residing on mainframes today exceeds US$1 trillion. Most of that code was written over the past 40 years in Cobol, with some assembler, PL/1 and 4GL thrown into the mix. Unfortunately, those programs don't play well with today's distributed systems, and the amount of legacy code at companies such as Sabre Holdings in Texas, makes a rewrite a huge undertaking. "We're bound by our software and its lack of portability," Sabre Vice President Alan Walker says of the 40,000 programs still running on IBM Transaction Processing Facility (TPF), Agilent Modular Power System and other mainframe systems.

Microsoft at the VSLive Conference here in San Francisco this week is touting PC clients and its upcoming Visual Studio 2005 Team System development platform.

The theme for Web services is integration, and Micro Focus International Ltd. plans to bring Cobol into the picture by equipping companies with tools that convert the legacy code to align with the emerging technology.

Micro Focus International Ltd. on Monday will unveil a version of its EnterpriseLink software that connects business partners to data on legacy IBM S/390 mainframes and AS/400 systems via Web services.

In addition to featuring endeavors by heavyweights such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle, the JavaOne show this week also will host a slew of other companies detailing new wares ranging from development tools for Web services to business-to-business functionality.

I've spent 12 years working in the insurance industry and the past four years programming insurance applications in Micro Focus Cobol. My company was recently sold, and I want to get out of Cobol programming and intoWeb technologies and e-commerce. I have Java training but no experience. I have two job offers. One job involves working on the support team for Web application servers. This includes networking, TCP/IP, firewalls and security. I have good customer support skills, and the company is willing to train me. The second job involves doing system testing on a Web application. Java developers do the coding. Which is the better choice? - Premium Position Dear Premium: Testing is probably the weaker of these two choices, says Susan Cole, a recruiter at technology placement firm Donahue & Moore Associates Inc. in New York. While Web initiatives are hot at financial, brokerage and insurance companies, your second choice only involves testing Java applications using automated tools, and you wouldn't be getting any hands-on Java development experience.