New Veryant Software Release Accelerates COBOL Conversion
vCOBOL streamlines legacy migration and improves performance more than 50 percent for applications accessing large relational databases

November 15, 2011 - Veryant, the COBOL technology innovator, today announced the immediate availability of vCOBOL Enterprise 2011 Release 3. A cost-effective alternative to mainframe and legacy Micro Focus COBOL dialects, vCOBOL provides a powerful environment for developing and deploying business-critical COBOL applications across Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft Windows systems.

With more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code still in existence and a shelf life that often ranges from 10 to 30 years, COBOL applications can access terabytes of data in today's modern businesses. With the addition of a new migration utility and the option to access relational databases through the Structured Query Language for Java (SQLJ), the new version of vCOBOL further simplifies transitions from legacy COBOL platforms for businesses looking to move business-critical COBOL programs that access large amounts of data to cost-effective, high performance open systems.

Asia's second largest listed exchange, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) has chosen Veryant's vCOBOL Enterprise software as part of a $3 million USD modernization project. Known as the "Asian gateway", SGX is the market of choice for investors wanting to participate in Asia's rapidly growing economies, and for Asian issuers seeking international capital. vCOBOL will be used at SGX to preserve migrated mainframe COBOL code and reduce costs without sacrificing the performance or availability of key applications such as clearing and settlement.

Organizations like SGX that migrate COBOL applications and relational databases, such as IBM DB2, from the mainframe to open systems can now take advantage of a new application migration utility to simplify the transition. Relational databases, such as IBM DB2 database software, require additional Embedded Structured Query Language (ESQL) syntax that is not required on the mainframe. The new release of vCOBOL prepares mainframe COBOL source code for open systems by automatically addressing these COBOL/ESQL differences.

Post migration, vCOBOL now offers companies the choice of accessing relational databases, such as IBM DB2 or Oracle, through JDBC or through the SQLJ convention. SQLJ calls are typically easier to write, and more concise than JDBC calls. Because SQLJ leverages static queries and a precompiler, SQLJ calls often run faster than JDBC. On internal tests, Veryant experienced greater than 50% faster performance when reading records with SQLJ.

Other enhancements in vCOBOL Enterprise 2011 Release 3 include:
  • Enhanced developer productivity from improvements to the vCOBOL Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and vCOBOL Debugger
  • Added compatibility with mainframe COBOL, such as support for numeric moves, numeric comparisons, and the “SYSTEM” library routine, to further simplify transitions to the vCOBOL platform
  • Greater diagnostics and debugging from improvements to the trace log
These enhancements, along with continued integration with UniKix Mainframe Rehosting technology from Clerity Solutions, make vCOBOL an ideal, cost-effective alternative to legacy COBOL dialects on open systems.

Contact:
Sue Myers
978.369.6336
pr@veryant.com