Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application management, development, and modernization solutions, is scouting customers for its latest offering in cloud computing.
While the company already has customers such as LIC, SBI, Max New York Life Insurance, etc. among a 120-strong clientele acquired over the last five years for other products, it is talking to large outsourcing companies for its software-as-a-service (Saas) offering.
"We will offer our services to all verticals. We are hopeful that the industry will lap up our offering essentially since we allow companies to use applications written in the COBOL language within cloud computing environments," said Ashish Masand, country manager for Micro Focus India.
What exactly is the offering? Micro Focus announced that it would be porting its enterprise COBOL solutions to the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud last December. This move has been inspired by Google. "Google is a well-known player in cloud computing, and we are offering enterprise cloud services by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in this space," said Mark Haynie, CTO (modernization) at Micro Focus.
Amazon EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Its Web service interface allows businesses to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. Micro Focus is supporting Amazon EC2 to increase the options customers have to reach the cloud and begin capitalizing on the cost savings associated with cloud computing. Enterprise Cloud Services uses an enterprise's existing encryption keys to secure mission-critical data while in motion (over the network) or while stored on persistent cloud storage, the company said.
Haynie said that the cloud is just another platform the company is offering customers. For many years if allowed people to use Windows, UNIX and even Linux. "This was natural progression for us, and our most exciting announcement so far."
The offering will be made in the form of software as a service based on the subscription pricing (pay as you go) model. Besides Microsoft and Amazon, Micro Focus also wants to leverage the expertise of IBM in this field. Haynie said being cloud agnostic, the company would like to advantage of IBM whenever it makes an announcement to enter the cloud."
For customers, it should help the IT department who is looking to transition is business from a capex to an opex model. Besides, the service model can complement all servers, applications and application organization tools.
Besides, COBOL is being used by independent software vendors (ISVs) and large enterprises. Data centers of enterprise customers are also on COBOL. For ISVs, this is an opportunity to convert their sales platform on the same line as that of salesforce.com.
According to industry experts, the latest offering by Micro Focus could gain some traction in the view that COBOL is primarily in use in ancient mainframes especially for banking and defense systems etc, where no one knows what was built in due to lack of documents, and the data is so immense the organization cannot release/loose it.
According to a source, COBOL will not be replaced even during transition from a legacy to a new IT platform since it requires a plan to move data out of legacy into new architecture and one need to support the old one.
Micro Focus will still have to develop a strong strategy to compete with giants in the field like salesforce.com that has launched a cloud computing business that enables developers to build applications on the software-as-a-service vendor's platform and tie those applications to Web services offered by Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, and other sites.
