Veryant Makes COBOL Migration and Modernization Easy

August 29, 2011 - Veryant, the COBOL and Java technology innovator, today said it is increasing the ability of its vCOBOL Enterprise to simplify application migration and reduce software costs for businesses by adding new compatibility with legacy mainframe and Micro Focus COBOL dialects and improved debugging capabilities.

"With an estimated 200 billion lines of COBOL still in use at enterprises worldwide, there is enormous need to preserve these large investments, yet evolve existing COBOL applications into more modern and useful resources," explained Dovid Lubin, vice president, Veryant.

vCOBOL is a high-performance, cost-effective alternative to legacy COBOL dialects commonly found running business-critical transaction processing systems. As a preferred resource to migrate COBOL applications off IBM mainframes and drive high performance interactive and batch applications on open systems, Veryant's vCOBOL supports enterprises' strategic IT initiatives for cost-cutting, consolidation, and operational effectiveness.

Today's new release, with even more capabilities, extends the value of companies' existing COBOL assets by decreasing annual software licensing expenses and enhancing interoperability with enterprise technologies such as XML.

"Developers using vCOBOL Enterprise are able to develop and deploy business-critical COBOL applications across UNIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows based systems from a single source code base without the need for any platform-specific work," continued Lubin. "This makes COBOL investments easily accessible to virtualized Cloud and traditional client-server environments, and increases their value to enterprises."

In the latest vCOBOL release, Veryant has added

enhanced compatibility with legacy COBOL dialects (support for XML PARSE and GENERATE).
support for common Micro Focus COBOL compatible library routines.
debugging improvements so users can trace paragraphs and programs as they execute.
mainframe compatible date, time, and delay callable services support, to provide current local time and date in several formats and conversion of dates and times.
the ability to make recursive calls, so a program can now directly or indirectly execute itself.

These enhancements, along with continued integration with UniKix Mainframe Rehosting technology from Clerity, make vCOBOL an ideal, cost-effective alternative to legacy COBOL dialects on open systems.

The new version of vCOBOL Enterprise is available immediately.