COBOL development, maintenance, and modernization company Veryant has laid down what it claims to be a 40% thin client performance improvement in its isCOBOL Evolve product.

The new iteration comes with additional cross-platform portability and a modernized user interface. But essentially, this upgraded product is still designed to offer a route to releasing potentially locked-in value inside COBOL assets as well as reducing ongoing software licensing costs — all practices that Veryant describes as the "application modernization".

Veryant's USP if anything here is isCOBOL's ability to enable developers working on open systems to continue programming in a familiar COBOL environment, but at the same time, deploy updated GUI-based applications across multiple platforms in an open Java framework without rewriting code.

"Delivering updated, modern interfaces to long-standing business logic is very important to our customers," said Veryant customer Dov Keshet of Starsoft Professional Services.

"isCOBOL technology provides the best of both worlds, by protecting long-standing COBOL application business logic and enabling cross-platform deployment as pure Java objects through standard web interfaces," he added.

Claiming to have won round customers previously reliant on Micro Focus COBOL technologies, Veryant details new isCOBOL enhancements to include new grid and web browser control properties for cross-platform portability; the previously stated thin client performance; and advanced green screen modernization capabilities without application re-engineering.

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Veryant's COBOL solutions enable applications to be deployed on multiple platforms from a single source code base — without the need for any platform-specific work. By compiling COBOL source code into Java and deploying pure Java bytecode objects, developers can add the power and flexibility of the Java platform to existing COBOL programs and make COBOL investments accessible to the Java world," said the company, in a press statement.