Staunchly holding onto its position in the enterprise application modernization market, Micro Focus has launched what it describes as a two new "next generation" mainframe migration tools. The company says that Micro Focus Studio Enterprise Edition (Studio EE) and Server Enterprise Edition (Server EE) v6.0 SP1 will deliver enhanced mainframe migration capabilities to companies looking to simplify their IT infrastructures.

Urging businesses to look towards delivering more innovative products and services than that which are possible under the encumbrance of their legacy systems, Micro Focus offers a suite of graphical tools that allows users to migrate mainframe business applications to lower cost platforms and supports the entire applications development lifecycle.

The company's "next generation" tag is arguably not much more than a marketing label; the new functionality that does in fact exist here includes the capability to automate data migration to Microsoft SQL Server and the ability to migrate and re-host PL/I applications, resulting in the ability to further reduce their reliance on the costly mainframe.

"Any mainframe shop faced with rising costs, skilled personnel retirement and lack of IT agility should consider these solutions as a way to begin the long-term modernization process," said Dale Vecchio, research vice president at Gartner. "Mainframe re-hosting solutions offer lower-cost and more immediate modernization results, with reduced IT spending within 12 to 36 months of the migration -- they also offer companies a way to leverage their COBOL and PL/I skill sets and modernize, as appropriate, on lower-cost platforms."