I've been reviewing a lot of Micro Focus Live presentations and videos from industry experts and customers that have already started work on their Cloud deployments over the past few days ready for the full launch on May 11th.
I've noticed some very clear themes emerging:
- The drive is on in IT to cut costs. I know - that's a "duh!" statement but it is real and, whatever concerns some organizations may have about making the move to the Cloud, they all agree that the benefits of "pay as you go", scalable resources, shifting from Capital Expense to Operating Expense, or outsourcing non-critical systems are all real opportunities to cut costs and maintain or improve services
- There are concerns about vendor lock-in and data security but the tipping point where those concerns are outweighed by cost or flexibility benefits varties across systems and some applications or organizations will be able to move more quickly than others
- At some point in the next 3 - 5 years, everyone involved with IT today will have something in their portfolio affected by the Cloud.
Every major business process in your company is built on sophisticated applications. As a result, the stability of your business is often tied to the stability of your applications. So, how can you make sure that the applications that run your business are matched with the goals of your business -- goals like risk-avoidance.
One key way is to understand your applications. These applications have developed over the course of years or even decades, growing in size and complexity. In fact, many have become so complex that it is difficult for your IT team to adapt these systems to support new requirements. For instance, to support a new product line or to eliminate redundant functions following a merger. Making changes to applications without adequately understanding the repercussions is a recipe for problems. Uniformed changes could lead to a temporary outage of your operations… which is an unacceptable loss.
But your business processes must change, and that means that your applications must change. So, how do you overcome complexity? It is by understanding the structure and behavior of your applications. Armed with business intelligence about the structure and function of your applications, managers can better choose priorities for development teams. And developers can ensure that the changes they make won’t affect other core systems.
At Micro Focus Live, we’ll take a look at this concept of application understanding from both the management side and the technical side. You’ll learn how managers can plan modernization activities that yield the biggest returns for your business. And you’ll see how development teams can quickly deliver on these requirements, emptying their development queues.
To go back a step - Why Mask? That’s a legitimate question and certainly typical production systems have many secure layers around them, but what about development systems and testing? When real data is used for testing you can potentially create an open back door to data privacy and security.
I also put Subsetting in the title of this blog, and that’s because using real data in testing may be the right thing to do for quality, but as well as having sensitive information often it’s huge. Managing additional copies of that data and trying to turn it into meaningful can be a very resource intensive and time consuming process – an automated and repeatable system that gives you much reduced but still realistic test data can save a lot of time and money.
Well, more about some of these topics in later blogs and of course at
Labels: Application Development, Data, privacy, testing
The Guardian: 50 years on, COBOL is still going strong
0 comments Posted by Arunn Ramadoss, Head of Connections Program at 00:57The Guardian tech recently featured an article on COBOL celebrating its 50th Anniversary. If you have not read it yet, you can read at http://tinyurl.com/dd399q.
Normally the way I get to know these featured articles have been published, is through an email from our PR agency. But this time around they were beaten by twitter. I regularly monitor the twitter channel on certain keywords and one of them happen to be "COBOL". Over the easter weekend there was such a flurry of activity about the article, it was the first time I have seen so much activity around COBOL on twitter! Check it out for yourself at: http://tinyurl.com/djdmoa.
There was a lot of positive tweets (for those unfamiliar with the twitter world, a tweet is a single micro-blog post on twitter, not longer than 140 characters). But, not quite unexpectedly, there were many who were surprised and event in despair that COBOL continues to thrive. I was able to have some interesting conversations with many of them.
What surprised most people was how much COBOL was still around, and just that fact that COBOL was used. Period.
If you are not following Micro Focus on twitter yet, you can follow us at: @microfocus. And lets hear it for COBOL!
Labels: Application Development, COBOL, COBOL developers
Your business operations are built on sophisticated application portfolios. These applications are ‘mission critical’ and cannot be allowed to fail. As a result, it is imperative that these systems conform to your standards for quality, stability, and efficiency. Neglecting to govern your development activities can expose your organization to unacceptable risks for business outages or similar disruptions.
At the same time, there are other external pressures on your application portfolio. Government regulations have become increasingly demanding. They compel you to adapt your business processes and prove that your systems adhere to requirements for privacy, security, and general behaviors. In this case, neglecting to govern your development activities can lead to significant legal exposure.
This means that it is important to govern your application portfolio throughout its lifecycle – from building applications through their modernization. Let’s look at several examples of how effective governance can help you to address business risks:
- Building Applications: As you maintain existing applications, or add new applications to the portfolio, it is important that they are well developed to avoid rework and outages. Effective governance involves analyzing your applications to determine how changes will impact the rest of the application portfolio. Further, by providing advanced development tooling, professionals can be more productive and greatly reduce the introduction of errors.
- Testing Applications: Analyzing applications to determine where to test can help to drive risks out of an application. But there are other aspects of risk that should be addressed during testing. For privacy concerns, it is imperative that customer data is never improperly exposed. Yet, for proper testing, you may require ‘live’ data. By obfuscating customer data you can address both issues and minimize risk.
- Managing Applications: Your organization will have different tolerances for different kinds of risks. As a result, it is important to define your key risk metrics and apply them to your application portfolio. By measuring your applications in business terms, you can spot misalignments and risk points and address them proactively through IT activities. This is especially powerful when executed within a recognized application management framework, like ITIL.
- Auditing Business Processes: For many kinds of regulatory compliance, it is necessary for IT to prove that their business processes conform to government mandates. But when business logic is buried deep within application code, how can you prove that you are compliant? Effective governance would respond by providing auditors with visibility into the business rules and processes embedded in their applications.
- Multiplying Expertise: Your applications are often very complex. This can lead to an overreliance on a small number of subject matter experts. This can be a substantial risk, as these experts can be inaccessible due to time constraints or movement to another role. By transferring knowledge about your applications between team members, a significant business risk can be removed. Also, through emulation technologies, you give authorized team members well-controlled access to proven business processes – further eliminating a troublesome bottleneck.
- Modernizing Applications: As you look to boost the efficiency and flexibility of your core applications, you will discover the advantages of modernizing existing systems. It is important to select modernization alternatives that return value quickly and cause virtually no disruption to your established business processes.
At Micro Focus Live, you’ll learn more about how effective governance of your application portfolio can boost business continuity and minimize risk.
Labels: APM, Application Development
If you’ve been following this blog (and if not, why not!) then you will have seen that we’re gradually providing more information about the session content at Micro Focus World 09. MFW'09 will have 15 tracks and over 100 separate sessions scheduled so there’s going to be a huge amount on offer for a wide developer audience - as it should be!
The conference theme is based around the concept of “Business 2.0” – how will organizations exploit the new technologies of Web 2.0, the Cloud, SOA, new platforms and new business dynamics while exploiting their considerable investment in powerful systems where they can’t afford to take risks. This is obviously very important and timely given the amount of change going on in the world and potentially paradigm-shifting platform changes gather speed.
Having said all that, Micro Focus isn’t about to forget its core strengths or its core audience. Developers are at the heart of all the changes and opportunities going forward, and their knowledge, skills, productivity and agility in moving across technologies and platforms mark them out as critical assets to any organization.
It also shouldn’t be forgotten just how much business awareness the development teams have – a “COBOL programmer” may seem like a fairly simple way to describe a role, but in reality a large proportion of their work is concerned with understanding how the business works, interactions between systems and people to achieve a result, optimal approaches to solving problems and much, much more. These people are critical corporate assets and need to be supported and nurtured (can you tell I used to be a programmer myself?!)
Anyway, I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight the developer tracks at the conference. There will be more details published over the next few weeks and months but sessions will cover everything from the COBOL language through best practices to exploiting new platforms and tools. Combined with the main conference sessions, optional training sessions will really enhance developers’ skills and value.
So, although the headlines might be talking about Business 2.0, we are keeping a close watch on developers and continue to push the envelope to provide the best support they need regardless of the business’ technology choices. Whether it’s running “big iron” mainframes, creating funky WPF & .NET applications on Windows or providing rich developer support across all platforms including UNIX and Linux with our newly launched Net Express/Server Express for Eclipse, Micro Focus provides state of the art development environments.
As a developer, what do you want to get out of the conference? What do you want to hear? As a self-confessed ex-developer and now Product Manager for Micro Focus’ Application Development tools, I’m really looking forward to meeting as many techies as possible in Dallas and hearing your feedback – but don’t feel you have to wait until then, please feel free to leave comments here to spark a discussion with your peers. I’m sure you will find some common themes or issues we should discuss.
Just for fun, some Dallas trivia: Did you know that the outlaw Frank James once sold sewing machines in downtown Dallas.
Want to shout about Micro Focus World?
0 comments Posted by Arunn Ramadoss, Head of Connections Program at 01:47If you are as excited about Micro Focus World as we are, then we thought you might want to shout about it too!
To help your shout loud, we have created a new web-widget that you can use to post on your blogs, or websites to spread the word about Micro Focus World.
How do you do that?! Quite simple: Here is the widget below. At the bottom of it, click on the "Embed code" link, and copy the code in the window that pops up, and paste it on your webpage or blog - and, hey presto!
Oh yes - dont forget to sign up, the early bird offer is still on. Like Stephen Kelly says - "the most exciting technology event of 2009, it's not one for you to miss!
See you there!
New White Paper from Datamonitor on COBOL
0 comments Posted by Richard Elmes, ISV Marketing Development Manager at 06:00With the 50th anniversary of the first release of COBOL next year, there is a huge amount of interest from end-users, independent solution vendors, analysts and the media on the evolution of the language and how it is continuing to play a critical role in supporting core business systems.
Butler Group /Datamonitor has just released a brand new assessment of the strength and value of COBOL-based assets in supporting the majorityof today’s business applications and Micro Focus is delighted to offer you the chance to download this excellent piece of research free of charge for a limited period. To secure your copy, please visit the link shown below:
Download the new Datamonitor White Paper
Labels: AcuCOBOL, Application Development, COBOL, COBOL developers
ACU / Liant update webcast from Drake Coker
0 comments Posted by Richard Elmes, ISV Marketing Development Manager at 07:47Drake Coker joins us on this webcast to speak about the plans going forward for our Micro Focus extend® product suite. Drake will be covering the following in the webcast:
- ACU development strategy explained: ACU and Micro Focus - forward together
- COBOL application development and modernization plans shared
- Meet the product managers and product solutions team who are driving the ACU family road map
- Ask questions of the presenters on the technical and commercial strategy for extend®
If you are interested in the Micro Focus extend® product suite, be sure to join the webcast on 11th December.
Full joining details and times on the following link:
Labels: AcuCOBOL, Application Development, COBOL, COBOL developers, Extend
Video Update: Stephen Kelly on MFW
0 comments Posted by Arunn Ramadoss, Head of Connections Program at 03:57The build up to MFW'09 continues! In this video recording hear Stephen Kelly, Micro Focus' CEO, discussing some of the compelling reasons why you can't afford to miss the 'most exciting technology event of 2009'.
I found the part on the agenda really exciting - "There are 7 tracks, with over 100 sessions to choose from...." and let's not forget the exhibition floor and the partners and sponsors, including Microsoft discussing their Azure Cloud platform, who are going to be there.
Let me step aside, and leave you to listen to Stephen directly:
Micro Focus has always been a staunch advocate of the COBOL standards process. I remember (long, long ago) working to get ANSI 85 certification (an interesting challenge as the standard, the compiler and the certification suites all seemed to be getting created simultaneously!) Micro Focus’ support for the standards process is still true today and you may have seen our recent announcement (click here to read the announcement) coinciding with the working group meeting in California.
I think the standards process has, overall, been a pretty good thing for COBOL - there is a good core standard and it has evolved over a long period of time to encompass every new technology as it came along - structured programming, object orientation, XML, web architectures, and now we’re moving towards the Cloud ... who knows what’s next? While all these innovations where being made, the core capabilities for high performance, high capacity, mission critical systems has never been lost. A pretty remarkable achievement.
By contrast, supposedly "standard" languages such as Java are starting to flounder somewhat. There have been some moves toward standardization to open up the language but significant enhancements have really dried up recently and I've never quite found the "write once run anywhere" nearly as real as what has been done with COBOL. Every week seems to generate a new “Java-like-but-better” language that come and go so quickly you can’t keep up.
Taking another route, which might be described as a "benevolent dictatorship", is C#. Don't get me wrong, here - Microsoft are doing some fantastic things with the language and framework. But would it progress faster and on more platforms if there was a widely supported standard and competing compiler/platform vendors?
So, I think standards have mostly strengthened COBOL. Or am I wrong? Perhaps you, as real users of the language don't care or aren’t happy with the way standards evolve? Is the important thing, really, that Micro Focus offers outstanding mainframe compatibility rather than simply adherence to the standards?
There will be discussion of the COBOL standard as it stands, its future and the process at Micro Focus World, but if you have any comments, please add them here and let’s get the discussion started now.
Perhaps you could also start nominating what features you think Micro Focus and the standards groups should be considering in the next release of the language?
Labels: Application Development, COBOL, COBOL developers
Allow me to add my welcome to the Micro Focus World Blog space. In the next few months as we prepare for Micro Focus World, I will be writting regularly to this blog space for users of Micro Focus COBOL products such as Net Express, Net Express with .NET and Server Express. My name is John Billman and I’m a Product Manager based in the Micro Focus Newbury, UK offices.
Where to start? Well, the context of this blog is Micro Focus World in Dallas, TX from May 11-13 2009. This is a discussion forum to explore the problems, solutions and information that will make this a truly compelling and valuable event. Through this process I’ll be soliciting ideas, feedback and comments in this space on the sessions that would be of most value to this group.
The starting point of course for usage of Net Express and Server Express is an investment in COBOL. This COBOL code often forms the heart of the business logic and data processing in an application or solution; it is fast, scalable, reliable and maintainable. At the same time COBOL IDEs and most importantly applications written in COBOL have continued to evolve alongside the world around them.
However, something I’d like us explore together in this blog and hopefully at Micro Focus World is the next step in the evolution or modernization of these critical COBOL applications. In other words, what are the priorities in extending these assets? What are the problems we are trying to solve? How does the changing business and technical landscape affect these applications? SOA, Web 2.0, .NET and the cloud all potentially have a role to play in the Future of COBOL applications – but what is the route to embrace these technologies?
So let’s start the blogging process, all comments are welcome.
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