Veryant Introduces New Offerings for COBOL Modernization

Veryant, the COBOL technology innovator, today introduced three new products, including an industry-first, to help companies improve productivity and reduce costs as they modernize valued COBOL legacy applications.

The new offerings, Veryant ODBC, isCOBOL File Server, and isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, are new additions to Veryant isCOBOL Evolve (2011 Release 3), a comprehensive, cost-effective platform for COBOL application development, deployment, maintenance, and modernization. The isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, which provides the ability to modernize to a graphical user interface (GUI) without sacrificing performance or changing the terminal login deployment model, is a first in the industry.

“These new products put more control and power into the hands of developers,” explained Dovid Lubin, vice president, Veryant. “They create important productivity gains and reduce costs by making it faster and easier to modernize COBOL applications.”

“More than 50 years after it was first introduced, COBOL is still the primary business language, with more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code still in existence, running on mainframes and open systems,” continued Lubin.

Veryant ODBC and isCOBOL File Server together enable modern client/server SQL access to COBOL data. isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, the first offering of its type for COBOL modernization, updates access via terminal emulators, and increases performance.

Veryant ODBC

The Veryant ODBC interface saves significant IT staff time by enabling them to use modern PC productivity tools, such as Microsoft Excel, Crystal Reports, and others, without having to migrate existing data files to a full relational database. The productivity boost is due to a new Windows driver for all supported file systems, including Veryant JISAM (Veryant’s native indexed file system) and the Micro Focus Vision file system (formally Acucorp's Vision file system).

isCOBOL File Server

Another productivity enhancer is the new isCOBOL File Server, which provides access to files on a remote server for all supported file systems, including Veryant JISAM and Micro Focus Vision, without requiring any changes to program code, which again saves valuable IT staff time. This feature can be used with Veryant ODBC to access files on a Linux or UNIX machine, or a remote Microsoft Windows server.

isCOBOL Graphical Terminal

isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, included with the isCOBOL Runtime Environment, is a capability offered only by Veryant and increases performance by eliminating network traffic. It enables users signing in with a terminal emulator such as PuTTY to launch graphical applications from the command line without an X Server or X Desktop client software. This provides applications with access to a user's environment variables and home directory, and can use the terminal emulator for stdin, stout and stderr.

All three products are available immediately. isCOBOL File Server and isCOBOL Graphical Terminal are part of the isCOBOL Runtime Environment.

About Veryant

Veryant delivers COBOL development, maintenance and modernization technology that optimizes IT resources, improves business performance, and dramatically lowers cost. Whether you are evolving existing applications through SOA, migrating from mainframes to open systems, or improving quality and distribution processes, Veryant's innovative software increases business productivity. Veryant is headquartered in Chicago, with offices worldwide. Visit http://www.veryant.com.