Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Companies that have written applications using the COBOL development environment from Micro Focus now have another server platform that they can deploy to: OS/400 on iSeries. Last week, at the IBM Technical Conference in Miami, Florida, Micro Focus, one of the leading independent tool vendors in the COBOL arena, announced that Server Express, its COBOL compiler, now supports OS/400 as a target platform, as well as most Unix variants, Linux, and Windows.

The primary goal in porting the Server Express compiler to OS/400 is to provide a migration path for users of Hewlett-Packard's HP 3000, a 25-year-old line of mini-computers that is similar in many respects to IBM's S/38, AS/400, and iSeries midrange line. One year ago HP announced it would end support of the HP 3000 platform in 2006, forcing the estimated 50,000 or so companies that still use the proprietary midrange server to choose a migration path.

"As hardware vendors announce the discontinuation of current platforms, organizations are looking at mitigating the risk involved during their migration while future-proofing their COBOL application assets," said Tony Hill, chairman and chief executive of Micro Focus, an international company with American offices in Sunnyvale, California. "Server Express for the IBM eServer iSeries meets both of these critical business needs."

IBM has looked to capitalize on the pending demise of the HP 3000 since HP made its announcement. Ian Jarman, IBM's iSeries product manager, said many HP 3000 shops that rely on COBOL code (it is about as popular on the HP 3000 as RPG is on the OS/400 platform) are making the move to IBM servers. "iSeries offers a highly integrated and low-cost solution for this community, and Server Express is an integral tool for migrating COBOL applications," he said.

The Micro Focus COBOL compiler was previously supported on IBM's other servers--xSeries, pSeries, and zSeries--leaving iSeries as the only unsupported platform. The idea of supporting the compiler on the iSeries originated when a Micro Focus customer approached IBM with the idea of running the compiler on OS/400, according to industry reports. The actual port to OS/400 was pretty much a non-issue: The company runs its AIX compiler in OS/400's PASE AIX runtime environment. The only change made to the iSeries version of the compiler had to do with how it installs on the machine, according to industry reports.

HP 3000 migration specialist TransforMix Computer Corp. has used Server Express as one of the tools in offering full application migration services, and it has confidence in the new COBOL compiler for OS/400. "Using an early release of Server Express for iSeries, we have confirmed that . . . iSeries is a new target platform we can recommend to our customers," said the Oceanside, California, company's president, Charles Finely.

Micro Focus is one of the biggest providers of COBOL development tools outside of IBM. The company's flagship product, an integrated development environment for writing COBOL applications called Net Express, has a 25-year lineage and is used by an estimated 28,000 developers at 5,000 sites. Micro Focus considers Server Express as a sister product to Net Express, providing the integrated development environment with deployment, debugging, and database support on each of its target platforms. Some of the technical features of Server Express that may be of interest to companies looking to move to the iSeries include 64-bit support, compatibility with the EBCDIC data format, and support for multithreading and symmetric multiprocessing machines, among other capabilities.

Micro Focus is taking steps to bring the COBOL legacy up to speed with an IT world that is in love with new technologies such as XML, Java, and Web services. Last week, the company signed an agreement with Microsoft whereby Net Express will ship as a plug-in to Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET and be able to compile COBOL code (presumably through Server Express) to Microsoft's Common Language Runtime language for execution on .NET servers. Micro Focus is expected to make Net Express available as a plug-in to .NET next June. For more information about Micro Focus, go to www.microfocus.com.