COBOL : THE MicroSOFT Links ........!!!

Fujitsu COBOL To Support Microsoft .NET Platform;

Fujitsu COBOL's support of the Microsoft .NET Platform will give COBOL programmers immediate access to leading-edge technologies.

Fujitsu Software Corporation product Fujitsu COBOL will support the Microsoft .NET Platform when it is first released in 2001.

Fujitsu COBOL developers will be able to take advantage of all of the latest technologies provided by the Microsoft .NET Platform.

This is a significant advance for the COBOL application development community that often has to wait for COBOL vendors to catch up with the latest Microsoft features. By supporting this new platform, Fujitsu Software Corporation ensures that COBOL will be an equal player with other languages such as Visual Basic and C++ when it comes to using the latest technology. COBOL developers will have access to the latest in Web services and application development frameworks, such as ASP+, Microsoft's successor to Active Server Pages (ASP).

"The Microsoft .NET Platform provides significant improvements in the creation, execution, and deployment of sophisticated graphical and Web-based systems," said Ron Langer, Director, COBOL Sales and Marketing, for Fujitsu Software Corporation. "COBOL is still the best language for business application development, so it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with Microsoft to integrate COBOL fully into the Microsoft .NET Platform."
===================================================================

Micro Focus Announces .Net Interoperability to Complement

Cobol/Java Support in Net Express 3.1

New functionality enables companies to use COBOL business logic in e-business applications

Micro Focus International Ltd. (Micro Focus(R)), a leading global enterprise development company for legacy systems, today announced further enhancements to its popular Net Express(R) product for developing and extending distributed COBOL applications to the Web. Increasing the return-on-investment in legacy systems, this groundbreaking development environment now supports interoperability with Microsoft .NET technologies in addition to the COBOL/Java interoperability introduced in Net Express 3.1.

.NET is an environment for developing and running software applications that offers rich standard run-time services available to components written in a variety of programming languages, and inter-language and inter-machine interoperability.

Net Express provides the only scalable alternative to running COBOL systems on the mainframe, offering companies a low-risk, cost-effective means of leveraging their legacy assets in an e-business environment. By implementing Net Express, companies can maximize reuse of existing IBM mainframe and proprietary platform COBOL applications, enabling them to participate in e-business applications across the enterprise. In addition, companies can now transform core business applications written in COBOL and extend them to the Web and other distributed platforms, including UNIX and Windows.

"With 85 percent of the world's business data accessed from COBOL, companies are struggling with ways to transform legacy code into evolving e-business applications which guarantee that customers, suppliers and partners can access, interact and benefit from this existing data," said Ian Archbell, vice president and director of product management of Micro Focus. "Net Express provides an unmatched solution for leveraging a company's legacy investment and programming resources to reduce the development cycle and accelerate the deployment of new applications."

=====================================================