IBM announced new software designed to help organizations extend business applications running on System z mainframes to web, cloud and mobile environments. IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS is intended to enable developers to deliver performance improvements in enterprise mainframe applications.
“COBOL powers many of the critical systems people rely on everyday,” says Kevin Stoodley, Rational chief technology officer and IBM Fellow. “With this new software, IBM is helping companies reduce operating costs and processing time associated with these applications while delivering new capabilities to take advantage of cloud, Web and mobile devices."
The new software supports Java 7, new UTF-8 built-ins, debugging enhancements, and unbounded tables and groups. COBOL for z/OS also provides a new level of z/OS System Management Facilities (SMF) tracking, which enables users who implement sub-capacity tracking to potentially reduce administrative overhead.
The new software also improves control over XML documents with the z/OS XML parser, allowing parsing workload to be off loaded to specialty engines to reduce operating costs.
IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS v5.1 compiler works with the latest versions of IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS), Information Management System (IMS) and DB2 software and is expected to be available later this quarter.
For more information, visit www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/entecoboforzos.