Rocket Finally Gets Its RUMBA, And A Whole Lot More

June 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

Sixteen years is a long time to wait, but that’s how long it took Rocket Software to acquire the assets of what used to be NetManage, which includes the popular 5250 emulator RUMBA. Rocket failed to buy NetManage back in February 2008, but it finally completed the deal for the NetManage assets in May 2024. And it got a whole lot more in a $2.275 billion deal that netted it about half of OpenText’s Micro Focus assets and puts its revenue over the mark of $1 billion per year.

Micro Focus, you will recall, was the company that swooped in and snapped up NetManage for $73.3 million back in May 2008 just a few months after Rocket Software failed to come up with the cash for its $69 million bid for NetManage. That would have been Rocket’s second big IBM i-related acquisition just a year after began its move into the IBM midrange with its $55.7 million acquisition of Seagull, the popular modernization tool vendor from The Netherlands.

OpenText, which acquired Micro Focus in 2023 for $5.8 billion, wanted to move the Micro Focus assets that were bundled in the Application, Modernization, and Connectivity (AMC) business, and it found a willing and able trade partner in Rocket, which is significantly larger these days than it was back in 2008.

The deal nets Rocket several products that were once owned by Micro Focus, including the RUMBA and Reflection emulators for IBM i and several tools for the System Z mainframe.

RUMBA, of course, was quite popular among midrange shops in the AS/400’s heyday and still has a solid installed base. In addition to RUMBA, Rocket gets Reflection, the multi-system terminal emulator originally developed by WRQ that was acquired by a private equity firm and merged with Attachmate back in 2005; Attachmate was acquired by Micro Focus in 2014.

Rocket already had a 5250 emulator, the lightweight BlueZone emulator that Seagull had acquired before it was acquired by Rocket. That gives Rocket three terminal emulator products. The company will continue to sell and service all of them, said Puneet Kohli, president of its Application Modernization business unit.

“There’s complementary stuff in there,” Kohli told IT Jungle at the recent POWERUp conference in Fort Worth, Texas. “We’ll have to figure out which one has the better personality and market share. But what this helps us do is serve the SMB market for the midrange and out to the enterprise level.”

There are five core pieces to the AMC business that Rocket just bought. They include:

• The Host Connectivity business, which includes RUMBA, Reflection, and OpenText Host Access for the Cloud
• The Micro Focus COBOL development tools and compilers
• Enterprise Suite, a System Z modernization offering for COBOL and PL/1
• An application development lifecycle management (ADLM) tool for the mainframe called ChangeMan
• And CORBA, which consists of enterprise application integration (EAI) middleware originally developed by Borland, IONA, and Prismtech

Rocket has had its eyes on these products for a long time and is thrilled to finally get them, according to Kholi. “We’re quite excited. We’ve been working on this quite a bit,” Kohli said. “We’ve been wanting to bring these businesses together for quite a while.”

Enterprise Suite is arguably the biggest “get” for Rocket, said Kohli, who is also on the board of directors for COMMON. “The part we see growth in is the Enterprise Suite piece. That’s the big modernization play,” he said. “That’s the big piece. Now it gives us a much larger spectrum.”

Mainframe shops are under intense pressure to modernize their applications – as much as their IBM i compatriots, if not more. While IBM introduced an copilot based on its watsonx AI stack last August to help mainframe shops migrate their COBOL code to Java, the new copilot that IBM is building for IBM i focuses on better understanding of existing RPG code and acceleration of RPG coding rather than outright replacement. (And is something that we have been predicting would happen.)

In addition to pushing Rocket’s annual revenues past the $1 billion mark, the deal for the AMC business unit will crank its customer base up to 12,500. The Waltham, Massachusetts company also gets 770 Open Text employees, including software engineers, and says it is going to hire hundreds of more people to complement its existing team.

“The acquisition of the OpenText AMC business is a significant milestone that sets a similar new standard for modernization innovation and excellence at Rocket Software and greatly accelerates our strategic growth and market penetration,” Rocket president and chief executive officer Milan Shetti said in a statement after the deal closed. “We now have the solutions, resources and expertise to tackle modernization challenges at scale, and the continued flexibility, winning culture, proven partnerships and growth mindset necessary to help our customers win today and well into the future.”

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