Key Quotes
Find out exactly why Micro Focus solutions solve critical business problems with this quick read of some of our customer, partner and analyst quotes.
We have used Micro Focus for some years now and see significant productivity benefits in application generator technology. Micro Focus’ consolidation of all required capabilities into a single environment means that Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition will make the task of critical mainframe application development and maintenance even easier and more productive.
Development Manager
a USA State Motor Vehicle Agency
We wanted to minimize re-training, knowing we were going into an entirely new domain, and also plan for ongoing maintenance. Our skills lie in COBOL, our existing systems are in COBOL, and Net Express was the obvious way forward for us.
George Cowe, Technical Specialist
Abbey National Financial and Investment Services
Our green-screen application was more than a decade old, and we were looking to simplify and modernize it quickly and cost-effectively, Micro Focus helped us Web-enable our internal mainframe application to give our sales executives the ability to track the status of customer contracts from input to completion via any Web browser.
John DeLoi, Director of Systems Engineering
ABC-TV National TV Sales, Inc.
We selected Micro Focus because it was the most mature compiler we looked at, with the highest mainframe compatibility and strong technical support. Our developers did not have to spend more time - and money - making changes to our existing source code.
Zigor de la Quintana, Alliances Manager
Accenture
One of my biggest concerns was converting the [IDEAL] code to COBOL. Although we were more than happy moving to Oracle, we were unsure how COBOL would perform. Now though, the KITS application is one of best performing applications we have is it represents the easiest application to maintain. We are more than impressed.
Dan Taylor, Senior Systems Analyst
Alliance Coal
Net Express and Revolve expedite the migration process with our clients. They cut in half the time needed to migrate, compile and test code. Micro Focus has been, and will continue to be, a critical component to the success of our business.
Sandy Allinson, President
Allinson-Ross Corporation
We reduced our mainframe charges about 50 percent and Mainframe Express provides us with additional functionality that you can't get on the mainframe. With Mainframe Express, our developers are more productive and that makes our business better.
Timothy Crowell, Systems Engineer
American Management Systems
The stud book department anticipates a AU$150,000 reduction in costs split between maintenance and staff costs. This equates to a 20% overall reduction on our IT budget. The new system delivers the ASB a time saving of 90 % on report generation.
Eric Richardson, System Development Manager
Australian Jockey Club
Bar some minor screen changes, the users experienced no differences on the new system but what surprised us most was the increase in performance. Daily processes that had taken around two hours before, were taking only forty-five minutes to complete after the conversion project. This was very significant, as these processes were the most resource-hungry ones.
Anders Spangberg, IT Project Manager
Axfood
The performance of Net Express has really impressed me. The application used to take between 20 to 40 minutes to run on the mainframe. With the new system it takes just 20 seconds. This is a tremendous increase in productivity and also means that any backlog in orders can be quickly addressed. It’s good to have that peace of mind.
Alison Richards, Developer
BCA (Book Club Associates)
My clients already exploit the tremendous value of Micro Focus' application generator technology. Working with the APS/AppMaster Builder and Mainframe Express technology for the last 15 years, and having done some major integration and customization between Mainframe Express and AppMaster Builder over the past five years at one of my key accounts in Germany, I believe Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition brings yet further improvements to the life cycle of application development. I have no doubt all customers will see significant productivity and quality gains. Testing the Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition deliveries on a regular basis together with our customers has also demonstrated Micro Focus' customer commitment and quality of work.
Peter Schmidt, Managing Director
Beratung und Analyse GmbH
Server Express was the natural choice for us. Micro Focus tools have several advantages: a modern architecture, high levels of performance, rapid implementation, extended functionalities and the ability to personalize them. We could not see the slightest reason to leave Micro Focus for another provider when we had exactly what we wanted!
Philippe de Wouters, Sales and Marketing Director
Callataÿ & Wouters
As a provider of software and solutions to IT organizations, CASE Solutions recognizes the productivity and quality benefits associated with application generation. We see Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition as a significant step forward in reducing the complexity and the cost of building mainframe applications.
Bruce B. Bridges, President
CASE Solutions Inc
At Casegen Technologies Ltd we use Mainframe Express extensively to test the COBOL and PL/I programs generated by our productivity software. Often, during a Telon-conversion for our customers, these programs can become very complex and we are always impressed by how effectively Micro Focus deals with our requirements and how simple the software is to set up. Recently, we needed to test CICS programs to run on a UNIX platform in ASCII and were able to do so by just making a simple change. We cannot even contemplate how we would be able to test our programs without this product.
Simon Cordingley, Technical Director
Casegen Technologies Ltd
Our goal was to get off the mainframe by Jan. 1, 2001.Shortly before Christmas 2000, we ran payroll and everything worked fine..…the conversion of the retirement system’s data files and processing programs took less than six months..Productivity has definitely gone up because people now have things at their finger tips that they did not have before
Lonnie Cladwell, Technology Director
City of St. Louis Public School Retirement System
Micro Focus Application Server’s real time ‘just-in-time debugging’, together with its production recovery capabilities, are critical for Condor’s product deployment.
Garry Horton, Director
Condor Corporation
After installing Revolve we saw results immediately. The speed and flexibility of the search facilities within Revolve helped to greatly reduce impact analysis time. The largest benefit was an immediate decrease in impact analysis time above 50 percent
Dave Novitski, Senior Technical Consultant
Convergys AT&T Wireline Retail Group
Micro Focus provides the most complete solution. The analysis tool is particularly impressive, and so too were the testing capabilities. Solutions from Micro Focus have helped us tremendously in the past and are easy and fast to learn. They have graphical user interfaces and excellent facilities for analysis, development, testing and debugging. They also have strong mainframe emulators, so each developer can have his or her very own IMS test region and DB2 session on the workstation, away from the mainframe.
Svend Overgaard, Manager, Development Tools
CSC Airline Solutions
Over the last 10 years, the Micro Focus products have enabled us to significantly reduce our development costs as well as improve the quality of our mainframe insurance and distribution management applications. Micro Focus's Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition product further enhances CSC's ability to leverage our mainframe assets by helping us produce better software products and services - it increases our productivity and reduces our development risk - it helps us compete in a price conscious global market.
Steve Westerholm, Group Life and Annuity Architect
CSC Financial Services
The server-based solution offers the same advantages as the mainframe-based solution, as well as the further benefits of lowered deployment charges and faster run time. Clients are impressed to see an industrial strength application that typically ran on a mainframe can now run so quickly with the server-based solution.
Jay White, Director
CSC Financial Services
Because of Micro Focus Mainframe Express, we can deliver more system capability to our clients because we have saved money and improved our own productivity. We estimate our overall cost savings from improved productivity to be 40 percent.
Jay White, Director
CSC Financial Services
Many financial services companies, which are hindered by strict internal cost justification requirements are extremely interested in a new solution which allows critical mainframe based applications to run on a lower-cost environment, such as the desktop or server. Micro Focus was the easy choice to help create this new product.
Jay White, Director
CSC Financial Services
Migrating all of our systems from VME to Sun has reduced costs by 45% a year and improved our productivity.
Bob Craske, Corporate IT Services Manager
Cumbria County Council
When using the Micro Focus Mainframe Express and Revolve software, participants experienced performance gains from 24% to as much as 71%
Dr. Kanter and Dr. Muscarello, Professors
DePaul University
Micro Focus has modernized our COBOL time and time again, and turned it into a high-tech solution, giving us the right tools to face the future.
Roger Engel, Vice President & Head of IT Development
Deutsche Bank Luxembourg
[Net Express] is a powerful productivity tool that was not matched by the other offering
John West, Manager Application Delivery, Information Services Branch, Corporate Services Division
DoIR
This project now enables us to deliver our i-Power browser based J2EE compliant suite of applications running on state of the art Sun Solaris, Sun Fire Unix servers with the data in an Oracle9i relational database. This enables us to increase transactional security, lower the cost of ownership and more easily integrate with third-party applications.
Gregg Hipp, President
EPL
Mainframe Express has demonstrated its capability in handling off-line COBOL development of a world-class credit-card processing solution. Its ability to provide an integrated development and test environment for a complex mainframe application on an Intel platform is impressive.
Nav Saini, Technical Consultant
Essentis
The project paid for itself in considerably less than a year. This solution has been live for over two years now and we are very satisfied with it. The project involved so few problems we could say it was a shame we didn't have to migrate other programs.
Bernhard Gebhart, Applications Manager
Eurocopter
This is really an impressive migration - the cost savings we have experienced since migrating off the mainframe have been exceptional. In the last full year of using the mainframe, we were paying £830,000 for leasing and maintenance.
Simon Cohen, Development Manager
Express Newspapers
We sometimes hear of COBOL dying out, but I disagree, Using Net Express we could easily translate our core COBOL data to XML. That made it really easy and fast to integrate our system in a non-invasive way with the existing system of BMW and others. With functionality like XML support built in to the language, and utilities available to automate the creation of copybooks from XML schemas, I see no limitations in COBOL whatsoever.
Daniel Liljebladh, CIO
FordonsData Nordic AB
The majority of European financial services firms clearly want to move toward application renewal.
Jost Hopperman, Vice President
Forrester
Service-oriented architecture, business services, and the insurance or banking backbone will establish the basis for a highly flexible and agile architecture.
Jost Hopperman, Vice President
Forrester
If SOA is the target, then you should realise that most experts advise a long slow evolution toward it
Phil Murphy, Principal Analyst
Forrester
Forrester surveyed 149 large insurance companies about their priorities and spending plans for claims management systems. While very few firms are dissatisfied with their systems, they want greater flexibility, better integration capabilities, and easier maintenance.
Marc Cecere, Vice President, Principal Analyst
Forrester
European banks are overwhelmingly moving toward application landscape renewal. Forty-six percent of European banks have already started to renew their application landscape; a further 23% plan to do so.
Jost Hopperman, Vice President
Forrester
The majority of European banks either have already started their renewal initiatives — which typically take several years — or will do so by 2010 at the latest.
Jost Hopperman, Vice President
Forrester
Software and services costs will total 100 billion
Jost Hopperman, Vice President
Forrester
CIOs are transforming the IS organisation to contribute business growth and efficiency. That contribution starts with a core of secure, high-quality IT services. It also requires aligning the CIO role with business expectations.
Gartner Executive Programs, EXP
Gartner
An effective and mature development tool for maintaining and extending core applications...We expect considerable reduction of costs.
Thomas Gaiser, Software Management, Kommunalfinanzen
German Ministry of Finance
This was a lifesaver for us. The pressure was on to implement Internet development for our major systems. Net Express enabled us to get going immediately, with the knowledge that it would be completed well within our timeframe.
Carol McCready, Heywood Development Director
Heywood Limited
By developing a Web services-based architecture, we have given both ourselves and our customers the ability to respond more quickly to changing business requirements
Peter Crompton, Technical Manager
Heywood Limited
We have worked with Micro Focus for some time and when we have needed help in moving our key point-of-sale system into production, the support team from Micro Focus was quick to respond and helped us through any and all issues to our satisfaction
Hollywood Video
We are very pleased with the web-based support systems that Micro Focus has implemented to help resolve customer issues even faster than by normal phone requests. The web logging of support inquiries allows us to track the responses we receive from Micro Focus and enables our two organizations to work more efficiently to get the most out of the Micro Focus software.
I.T. Solutions Team, Scarborough Building Society, UK
In today’s mainframe or core-systems environments, applications and processes built on traditional languages and runtimes continue to deliver a whealth of mission critical benefits to large organisations. These applications and processes also represent significant investments in terms of development, maintenance, training an other factors. Organisations want to leverage the value in these processes and applications as much as possible.
IBM
Every day, more and more enterprises discover the advantages of migrating their most critical business applications to Linux running on a zSeries mainframe. The addition of solutions like Micro Focus Server Express helps continue that momentum, and provides customers with a valuable tool to assist them in making the transition to Linux on the mainframe.
Joan Meltzer, Director of Solutions Marketing
IBM Systems Group
We achieved concrete savings of 50,000 euros per-month and as a result we expect to achieve an outstanding ROI. We are convinced that the migration of our application to the Windows platform, accomplished with Micro Focus, was the correct, lowest risk path to reduced costs, with greater agility
Günter Bodner, CIO
ICS Competence Center of DirectGroup Bertelsmann (Germany)
It’s essential that we can evolve our systems as we expand and encounter new business requirements. This also means embracing new technology such as Web services and Microsoft .NET, with Micro Focus we really feel we have made an important and strategic move for the future.
Manfred Zillinger, Chief Development Officer
ICS CompetenceCenter (Germany)
Micro Focus Revolve Enterprise Edition allows Idea Integration to address the varying requirements of our customer base - from application documentation to business rule mining and beyond - faster and more accurately than any other approach we've found.
Steve Steuart, Vice President
Idea Integration
Net Express and Server Express expedite the migration process with our clients. They significantly reduce the time needed to analyze, migrate, compile and test code. Micro Focus has been, and will continue to be, a critical component to the success of our business
Alexander (Sandy) Allinson, CEO
Inglenet Business Solutions
We are supporting 24 offices throughout Sweden who process auto claims. We need to have a disciplined process to mainframe application change, and making Revolve part of our development methodology will allow us to save time, accurately estimate the amount of effort required and help us roll out new functionality for our claims processing team.
Sven-Olov Zetterström, Mainframe Development Manager
Länsförsäkringar
Vestcom paid $1 million for the migration, but estimates that it is now saving $500,000 a year thanks to reduced CPU and other usage expenses once associated with the mainframe. That means the project will hit full ROI in just a few months.
DeMir Barlas, Managing Editor
Line56
Mainframe Express is a great development tool that has helped LT develop a fully functional application. With little effort a developer can learn to navigate, and become productive in a very short period. Because Mainframe Express resides on the PC a developer can code, compile, and test without having to depend on the mainframe. As a result, the mainframe is relieved of development processing, which maximizes its usage. Consequently, an additional trait of Mainframe Express is that it can be installed on a laptop, which eliminates the need for telecommunications, giving freedom to the developer to code anywhere, thus increasing productivity.
Chief Architect
Luminous Technology Group
The initial transition to .NET is on the server side, and we have found Net Express with .NET easy to use and focused on helping us reuse what we have within the .NET Framework. The only challenge is where we have made use of OO base class libraries such as ordered collections as these are not managed code, we will take this opportunity to implement these as .NET classes instead. However, since Net Express with .NET provides COM interoperability support, this can be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, saving the need to completely re-write certain components that rely on Micro Focus OO base class library.
Simon Hart, Senior Programmer
McGuffie Brunton
We have used Revolve Enterprise Edition on a number of inventory-wide analysis and change projects. It is helping us estimate more accurately and we get projects completed significantly faster. We have reduced the time taken for certain inventory-wide analysis tasks by more than 80 percent.
Shawn Klingensmith, Vice President Development Support
Mellon Financial Corporation
Since Revolve became available our traditional ways to scan look pretty much useless.
Mellon Financial Corporation, Mainframe Development Team Member
Mellon Financial Corporation
Micro Focus' Revolve has provided the flexibility and functional richness for MigrationWare to significantly extend the reach of Revolve's functionality into both the IDMS and ADABAS arenas. With these extensions Revolve can analyze COBOL systems that use either CA-IDMS or Software AG's ADABAS databases and provide the full range of Revolve's impact analysis reports for systems utilizing these technologies. Because of the accurate management information the solution provides, we recommend to our clients that they should definitely use Revolve as part of any decision making process, whether they are considering updates, migration or extension to their existing systems
Mark Cooper, Managing Director
MigrationWare
Thanks to the Micro Focus solution it is possible to reuse, modernize and extend our existing COBOL code to evolve with the most recent technologies. We are also saving on additional training costs for our IT staff since we are able to maintain COBOL as our core platform...
Francis Dries, Director of HR Application Development
Ministry of Finance
Deciding to migrate to UNIX was primarily a matter of saving money and being able to offer our customers better value and service. However, we experienced significantly better performance from the batch programs. They run five to six times faster than before making the operations more flexible. It’s definitely an improvement, which makes us very pleased.
Jens Peter Jørgensen, Manager of Development
Nord Data
Not only do we enjoy huge technical advantage, the much lower running cost make justifying such a move very easy. We estimate a return on investment in less than seven months - with significant additional long-term savings.
Sara Brees, Assistant Director IT Service
ORC
If your capacity requirements are modest you should look at your options. It won’t make sense to migrate away from the mainframe in all circumstances, but it will in some
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The number of enquiries that we’re getting from our clients about the viability of the mainframe platform, mainframe migration and the future of Cobol has grown significantly in the past 12 months.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
In general terms, the mainframe is fit and well. Brand-new mainframe MIPS shipments (as opposed to replacement MIPS) continue to grow by around 15% a year, and the number of lines of Cobol code in production continues to grow by between 3% and 5%. The mainframe isn’t going to disappear tomorrow; indeed, we expect mainframes to be in production well into the next decade at least.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
While the number of deployed MIPS is set to grow, the number of deployed mainframes will decline. Essentially, at the high-end, mainframes are getting bigger while at the low-end a significant number of smaller mainframes will be switched off.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
Over the next five years smaller mainframes will come under intense pressure from x86-based (Intel and AMD) platforms as their price/performance improvements out-pace the mainframes by a significant margin. The price/performance gap is still widening, despite the excellent progress that IBM has made with the mainframe.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
Cobol remains the most widely deployed programming language in big business, accounting for 75% of all computer transactions – and it is not going to go away. Cobol is pervasive in the financial sector (accounting for 90% of all financial transactions), in defence, as well as within established manufacturing and insurance sectors. We estimate that there are over 200 billion lines of Cobol in production today, and this number continues to grow by between three and five percent a year.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The cost of mainframe hardware is still very high; in many cases Intel/AMD-based hardware is ten-times less expensive.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The reliability of non-mainframe platforms is closing on the mainframe, and technologies that used to be the preserve of the mainframe (notably virtualisation) are now ‘crossing over’ to the world of Intel and AMD.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
Over the next five years the number of individual mainframes will decline by around one third. However, the total number of deployed mainframe MIPS will rise by at least 10% annually over the same period.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
We believe that the small mainframe (sub-500 MIPS) is an endangered species. We expect the number of mainframes in the tiny and small categories to decline significantly over the next five years.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
The mainframe migration market will grow gradually over the forecast period, peaking in 2009 before beginning to fall off.
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM
We chose Micro Focus Revolve because it is easy to use, yet a very powerful analysis tool for COBOL developers. As we continue to implement complex enhancements in our applications, tools like Revolve will help improve our estimation accuracy, software design, development time and software quality, while reducing overall IT costs spent on critical projects.
Jeff Bradshaw, Assistant Vice President, Application Development
Pacific Life
The investment in this IT project may be one of the wisest decisions we have made as it has enabled some profound improvements in our business processes. We believe this will make Québec Loisirs significantly more competitive over the coming twelve months.
Régis Étheart, CEO
Québec Loisirs (Canada)
The savings we experienced in recurring fees related to developing and operating CAS on the leased mainframe versus the purchased Windows servers is in the order of $150,000 per annum.
Léo Théberge, CIO
Québec Loisirs (Canada)
I'm very happy that we made the decision to go with EuroSmart. Other products simply couldn't provide the same level of quality or hit rates in test runs.
Thomas Klammer, Euro/Systems Analyst
Quelle Linz
Micro Focus® Studio™ not only offerspowerful analysis tools but also provides insight into the size of the application. This data can serve as criticalmanagement information. The numberof lines of code enables me to estimate Gemal’s complexity... This, combined with the productivity improvement andcost savings on mainframe capacity, makes it clear that Micro Focus is theright choice for us.
Bert de Ruiter, Product Development Manager
Raet
Red 2000 and our central reservations system, LMS, an AS/400 application, could not communicate. Because of this, we found it took more staff time to manage room type availability... The great thing about this package is that we not only linked the two systems, but the ease of use of the new system, with important customer information, makes future enhancements easy to implement.
Phil Felix, Manager of Information Systems
Ramada Express
It used to take 2-3 months to develop and test a check program, and another 2-3 months were required for the deployment to various agency systems, call centers and e-business systems. Automobile Group, Insurance System Division. Now we can now reuse our components on any kind of platform. The resulting reduction in the development and test periods has considerable business benefits. It also appeals to us that with Net Express, COBOL engineers who have experience with host machines can develop e-business systems with ease.
Toru Kitagishi, Chief Systems Engineer
SAMPO Japan System Solutions Inc.
Micro Focus and Microsoft have helped us position INGENIUM to a wider range of customers without sacrificing the security or scalability we enjoy on the mainframe version, which many of our customers continue to use. It truly is the best of both worlds.
Blair Goulet, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Global Initiatives
SOLCORP
We’ve been using Net Express to migrate portions of our ICL mainframe application to a Windows NT environment. Using Net Express, our own in-house COBOL experts have successfully completed the re-hosting of two key modules effortlessly. We couldn’t be more impressed with the Net Express product. It’s simply miles ahead of the tools our team has been using for the last few years.
Maurice Winn, Systems Manager
Southampton Container Terminals Ltd.
As promised in our project evaluation, SPI Consulting expertise and proven track record of more than 30 successful individual company migrations has once again delivered. The success of this project can only be due to contributions made by a dedicated team consisting of key staff from DaimlerChrysler, SPI Consulting, Micro Focus and MigrationWare.
Ray Blignaut, Managing Director
SPI Consulting
We did not have to compromise on existing functionality in any way. All round performance is excellent
Tony Dickinson, IT Manager
Stead & Simpson (UK)
The installation of Server Express was simple and only took about five minutes, Server Express cut in half the compile time of some of our biggest programs.
Wayne Darling, Senior Systems Analyst
Systems & Software
Our clients in the Scandinavian area tend to have very large amounts of source code in their core systems. With the amount of changes needed for those systems each year - from business initiatives through to compliance changes - there is always the need to accurately estimate and plan this work. We always recommend Micro Focus Revolve technology for this task, because it really saves our clients hundreds of hours each year, and gives them the most accurate assessment results each time. These days, we suggest clients don't plan major code changes without it.
Par Parling, Managing Director
tp tech scandinavia
In our migration from IDMS DB/DC to CICS/DB2 a complete application inventory was inevitable. This was the only way to ensure that our migration partner received a complete set of the application sources and database components. Micro Focus Revolve allowed us to implement a consistent and repeatable 'Application Collection Process'. Within that automated process we were able to extract information from the IDMS data dictionary and also enable further analysis tasks in Revolve, such as a programming standards review.
Peter Luttenberger, Data Base Administrator Solution & Service Center, enterprise Solutions Global Competence Centre
T-Systems
Micro Focus has clearly taken great pains to develop products that not only deliver rich functionality but are also extremely easy to work with. The company has a comprehensive vision for future development in creating their technology, and we would consider working with Micro Focus again on future endeavors.
Joe Mislinski, CIO
Vestcom
