While 70 percent of CIOs believe the mainframe has a central, strategic role, an independent global research study with 590 CIOs and IT Directors has confirmed that many mainframe applications are falling behind business requirements. This group estimated average mainframe application IT debt – the cost of clearing the backlog of maintenance to bring the corporate applications portfolio up to date – at $8.5 million per organisation. To help meet this challenge, Micro Focus, the provider of enterprise application modernisation, testing and management solutions, has released Micro Focus Enterprise Developer for IBM zEnterprise, enabling customers to optimise all aspects of IBM mainframe application delivery and drive down costs, increase productivity, and accelerate innovation.
Micro Focus Enterprise Developer for IBM zEnterprise is built for customers modernising applications for deployment on the mainframe or any of the IBM zEnterprise environments. The product uses either the Microsoft Visual Studio or Eclipse-based Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) with mainframe integration, and also includes tools to support development and unit testing on IBM z/Linux, AIX and x86 environments.
Commenting on its implementation of Micro Focus Enterprise Developer for IBM zEnterprise, Philippe Bailly, Director of Shared Services Centre at Steria in Nantes said: “The solution has enabled us to standardise our mainframe development environment and maximise programmer productivity. Moving to this Eclipse environment also means it is easier to recruit new developers and transition our existing staff thanks to user-friendly tools and a unified mainframe and Java development environment.”
Greg Lotko, Vice President and Business Line Executive, IBM System z, said: “The IBM zEnterprise System is the result of more than $1billion in R&D investments over the past four years, resulting in major improvements in performance, security, availability and other key enterprise features. We are continually working with our technology partners to help our clients maximise the value in their IBM mainframes, and this latest innovation from Micro Focus is a great example of that commitment.”