Clerity Solutions has announced a "statement of direction" for a newly designed Windows- and .NET-managed-code version of the company's UniKix Mainframe re-hosting software. Aiming to serve companies moving legacy apps to the Microsoft Azure cloud application platform, Clerity claims to offer a route to cost savings as high as 70 percent — although the company does not detail the precise (or even approximate) mechanics of this calculation.

"There is a growing interest among mainframe shops to move workloads," said Dale Vecchio, research vice president at Gartner Research. "As the scale of these migrations grows beyond the small, couple of hundred millions of instructions per second (MIPS) shops, to shops with as high as 2,000 to 3,000 MIPS, being able to leverage a complete .NET implementation will become increasingly important to organizations with a long-term application modernization roadmap."

Essentially then, UniKix aims to power business-critical online and batch applications originally written in a variety of languages, including COBOL, Natural, Assembler, and PL/1. Based on UniKix technology, Veryant's vCOBOL Enterprise software (and Microsoft Visual Studio), this new solution is planned to be delivered in two phases, starting in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Initial deliverables will include integration of Microsoft Visual Studio, IIS and System Center Operations Manager to Clerity's mainframe re-hosting platform, as well as a complete redevelopment of the Windows user experience within UniKix. This solution will aim to make a rich user experience available to developers maintaining and modernizing legacy applications on the Windows Application Platform, as well as provide a full Windows look and feel for installation, configuration, and management of the re-hosted environment.

"Clerity's mainframe re-hosting technology is designed to provide value to customers that want to reduce mainframe costs by moving their COBOL/CICS/ JCL applications to the Microsoft Application Platform," said Bob Ellsworth, director of Enterprise Platform Modernization at Microsoft. "Running re-hosted mainframe applications as .NET components in the Windows Azure cloud with Clerity is aimed at providing a compelling and cost-effective alternative for IBM customers."