IBM Unveils New Software to Enable Mainframe Applications on Cloud, Mobile Devices

New compiler improves application performance and helps modernize COBOL business applications running on System z

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May 17, 2013, 03:36 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., May 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new software to help organizations extend crucial business applications running on System z mainframes to web, cloud and mobile environments. The software's performance improvements will enable companies to significantly reduce operating costs while helping businesses seamlessly and efficiently extend services for support of modern infrastructures.

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Today, nearly 15 percent of all new enterprise application functionality is written in COBOL. The programming language also powers many everyday services such as ATM transactions, check processing, travel booking and insurance claims. With more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code being used across industries such as banking, insurance, retail and human resources, it is crucial for businesses to have the appropriate framework to improve performance, modernize key applications and increase productivity.

IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS, enables developers to deliver significant performance improvements in their business critical applications. For example, applications using the new compiler have shown performance increases of 10 to 20 percent.

"COBOL powers many of the critical systems people rely on everyday," said Kevin Stoodley, Rational chief technology officer and IBM Fellow. "With this new software, IBM is helping companies reduce operating costs and processing time associated with these applications while delivering new capabilities to take advantage of cloud, Web and mobile devices."

The new software helps companies deliver innovative solutions to their customers and reduce costs by:

Providing support for Java 7, new UTF-8 built-ins, debugging enhancements, and support for unbounded tables and groups.
Supporting a new level of z/OS System Management Facilities (SMF) tracking, which allows users who implement sub-capacity tracking to reduce their administrative overhead.
Improving control over XML documents with the z/OS XML parser, allowing parsing workload to be off loaded to specialty engines to reduce operating costs.

IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS v5.1 compiler works with the latest versions of IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS), Information Management System (IMS) and DB2 software and is expected to be available later this quarter.

IBM was recently named the number one vendor in the Gartner market share for Application Development software with 22.4% share (Gartner, Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012, March 29, 2013).

For more information, visit http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/entecoboforzos

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SOURCE IBM