Visual COBOL Development Hub

Solution overview
BUSINESS CHALLENGE

There is an increasing demand from users of business software
for easier to use applications which integrate with other business
systems. As a result IT organizations are being asked to deliver
modern user interfaces and integrate multiple business systems.
At the same time IT continually strives to reduce operational
costs and risk by standardizing on common platforms for all their
applications. This way, the same tools and processes can be used
regardless of which programming language the IT team built the
applications with. Microsoft’s .NET framework and the Java Virtual
Machine (JVM) are widely seen as the standard frameworks of
choice.
Moving to commodity hardware and standard frameworks can
return considerable cost savings and business agility. But often,
IT organizations must contend with long-standing applications
that run on aging or even unsupported hardware and software
environments. Previously, IT organizations and ISVs considered
that their only option to deliver new features and deploy into
the standard frameworks was to rewrite business applications
in newer languages, such as Java or C#. This introduces
considerable cost and risk for little business value. With Visual
COBOL the application can remain in COBOL and the application
provider can choose to deploy across a wide range of enterprise
platforms including .NET or JVM. This way the organization can
retain the benefits of the platform as well as the traditional
strength and reliability of existing application investments.
IT organizations must also find ways to transfer skills and resource
to support existing application investments, avoiding the pitfalls
of siloed application development. By standardizing within the
leading integrated development environments (IDEs) – Visual
Studio and Eclipse – with advanced COBOL tooling, IT organizations
can quickly train new developers already familiar with the tools and
processes. This increases business agility and reduces cost.