virtual mainframe

Rehost Development

The reliability and security of mainframe environments have made rehosting development the natural choice for mission-critical business applications. With the majority of mainframe processing power allocated to production and test environments, the mainframe is not the most appropriate platform for ongoing development.

Today’s businesses look to deliver new and improved products and services to stay competitive, gain market share and drive growth. It is not unusual for software organizations to spend more than 80% of their time keeping existing applications compliant and functional. Finding strategies that increase productivity and increase the focus on innovation takes centre stage. For many, migrating the entire application off the mainframe is a viable option. But when an organization is not quite ready to take that step, rehosting development is a strategy that organizations would do well to consider.

Organizations have seen productivity improvements of over 30% simply by rehosting development off the mainframe. Analysis and compilation tasks that can take hours on the mainframe can be completed in minutes. Developers can then connect back to the mainframe where all updates are synchronized and promoted for subsequent testing phases.

Rehosting development is a core element of Virtual Mainframe from Micro Focus.

What role do you see the mainframe playing in your organisation’s future?

ImpRove DevelopeR pRoDuctIvItyIncreases in developer productivity of over 35% have been achieved by rehosting the development environment of a mainframe application to Windows. Developers access far greater processing power than is usually available to development processes on the mainframe. Additional business benefits are realized, including:

Reducing time-to-market

Development costs are reduced

Releasing resources for innovative developments to increase competitiveness

ResouRces foR InnovatIonBy increasing development productivity, more can be achieved with less as a higher percentage of development resources is focused on innovative projects rather than maintaining existing applications:

Developers re-use existing skills and expertise within a highly productive graphical environment with a dedicated CPU, eliminating mainframe processing bottlenecks

Developers time is released to fulfil more business requirements, and expertise is dedicated to initiatives that deliver the biggest benefits

New or improved business services are delivered faster by using tools to expose existing mainframe transactions as Web services for faster re-use, and to help aggregate complex screen flows into more intuitive, productive user interfaces

aDDRess maInfRame skIlls shoRtagesMigrating development environments off the mainframe removes the risk of shrinking numbers of mainframe programmers:

Increase IT flexibility as existing mainframe application developers can quickly become SMEs on more applications, and non-mainframe developers can very quickly contribute to mainframe application development if required.

Business drivers and benefitsMany enterprise organizations face significant challenges in maintaining and expanding their business while managing costs. As part of Micro Focus Virtual Mainframe capabilities, Rehosting Development delivers many benefits, including:

Significantly improving developer productivity

Improving time-to-market

Address mainframe skills shortages

These deliver significant and dramatic business transformation – extending an IT budget that previously just ‘kept the lights on’ to one that enables new business opportunities.

Rehost DevelopmentMicro Focus Rehost Development capabilities provide a Windows based analysis and integrated development environment (IDE) for mainframe COBOL development organizations. The products support IBM COBOL, IBM Assembler, IBM CICS, IBM JCL, IBM DB2, IBM IMS (TM and DB), IBM z/OS file formats and SORT utilities on Windows. This means the day to day analysis, edit, compile and debug tasks to maintain and improve core online and batch applications can be undertaken on Windows workstations. Each developer can work offline from the mainframe using their dedicated workstation or laptop rather than relying on mainframe processing power.

All phases of the mainframe application development lifecycle are supported; from initial application design and generation, through analysis, development, compilation, unit testing and debugging. Application understanding and analysis capabilities ensure developers learn more about their application structure, understand the potential impact of individual changes and reduce the risk of inadvertently introducing errors.

The IDE provides rapid access to all of the tools needed to maintain, improve, modernize and test COBOL-based applications that will be deployed on IBM mainframes including Enterprise COBOL, COBOL for OS/390, COBOL for MVS, COBOL/370, VS COBOL II and OS/VS COBOL applications.

Improved testing via sophisticated visual debugging capabilities for analysis of the execution flow of applications to help determine changes, ensure that updates deliver the desired results, and resolve any unforeseen coding issues.

All of these capabilities serve to increase developer productivity off the mainframe, leading to additional business benefits.

Real-world benefits of Rehosting Development

csc financial services groupDeveloper productivity up by 25%

fidelity Information servicesGreater developer collaboration, quality and stability

CSC Financial Services Group serves nearly 5,500 financial services clients across 50 countries and needed a cost-effective way to enhance and deploy its financial services software on both mainframes and low-cost environments.

The company uses Micro Focus Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition to develop and test solutions in a Windows environment before delivering the final mainframe-based solution to clients.

Fidelity Information Services is one of the world’s largest providers of technology solutions and processing services to the mortgage and financial services industries. Its strategic banking application, Corebank, is a superior next generation, customer-centric, core processing solution for large global banks.

Rehosting Corebank from the mainframe onto a distributed Windows environment enabled:

Rehost Development: a proven approachAs part of Micro Focus’ Virtual Mainframe offering, Rehosting Development offers a compelling option for organizations currently developing on mainframe environments. Of primary focus is increased productivity, this in itself leads to many other business benefits such as improved time-to-market and greater focus on innovation. Rehosting development also provides a strategy to address potential mainframe skills shortages, now and over the next few years.

Micro Focus’ Rehost Development is achieved through replicating the mainframe infrastructure on Microsoft Windows, creating a Virtual Mainframe. This powerful technology has benefited many customers and also provides the foundation for further modernization initiatives, including the consideration of full application migration in the future.

As a result, CSC Financial Services Group:

Improved customer service

Increased developer productivity by 25%

Lowered deployment charges and increased runtime speeds for clients

By working with Micro Focus CSC achieved around 40% overall cost savings from improved productivity, and saves around $600,000 in annual mainframe costs. Its Six Sigma rating has increased as the Micro Focus solutions help them find and correct errors before transactions are run.

More than 50 developers to work on a decentralized platform

Developers to perform analysis, compilation, debugging and unit testing on local and remote workstations

The company to overcome the risk of a ‘single point of failure’

Accelerated development and maintenance efforts

More effective QA procedures, keeping all documentation up-to-date and managing impact analysis

about micro focusMicro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization, Testing and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk.

for additional information please visit: www.microfocus.com© 2011 Micro Focus IP Development Limited. All rights reserved. MICRO FOCUS, the Micro Focus logo, among others, are trademarks or registered trademarks of

Micro Focus IP Development Limited or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies in the United Kingdom, United States and other countries. All other marks are the

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virtual mainframe