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Micro Focus Brews Success at America's Oldest Brewery

Micro Focus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition helps Miller Brewing Company speed application development and testing environment, reduce mainframe expense

NEWBURY, England, and SAN DIEGO, CA, - May 28, 2008

Micro Focus® (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, today announced that Miller Brewing Company has successfully implemented Micro Focus Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition (MFEEE) to reduce its costly reliance on mainframe processing.

Miller’s mainframe currently features 40,000 programs and COBOL applications, which are managed by its proprietary, Production Installation Transfer System (PITS) and PANVALET. PITS is Miller’s process of moving mainframe jobs, programs, and copybooks into production. The flexibility of Mainframe Express enabled Miller to integrate this solution into their existing business process. Because of several business reasons, Miller sought a solution to help transition the company’s reliance off the mainframe into a server-based and workstation environment.

Initiated in October of 2006 with the help of Micro Focus, Miller created a .NET application to move programs back and forth from the mainframe. This allowed for 25 percent of Miller’s mainframe development to be done using Mainframe Express. It also provided the developers with an easy to use method of moving programs between environments.

To approach this project, Miller first installed MFEEE on their Citrix farm, moving all 10,000 APS programs over to Mainframe Express. After generating all programs, which converted the APS code to COBOL, Miller was able to compile and test a selected set of programs, train development staff, and install MFEEE into production.

Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition allows COBOL programmers to quickly and easily extend mainframe application development into J2EE, .NET or Web services, without changing the original code, or having to learn new architectures. Micro Focus' unified environment for mainframe development significantly reduces risks and costs, and offers improved business agility through extension to J2EE, .NET and Web services.

Executive quote

"Miller understands the importance of leveraging and extending existing IT assets to deliver an improved business performance, with the ultimate goal being the deprecation of its mainframe environment,” said Kevin Moultrup, President, North America Operations, Micro Focus. “Micro Focus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition allows Miller to do just that and we’re happy to be an integral part of its wider modernization effort.”

Customer quote

“Miller’s implementation of Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition signifies the beginning of our mainframe modernization strategy,” said Tim Heeley, Principal Systems Analyst, Miller Brewing Company. “Mainframe costs are significant, and we are now exploring alternatives. By moving to a server environment, we expect to realize cost savings as we expand our modernization effort over the next one to three years. Micro Focus is playing an important role in helping Miller achieve maximum competitive advantage through innovative and effective technologies.”

According to Heeley, Miller’s next step is to move testing from the mainframe to the Windows environment. “This is an area where we will definitely see cost savings in testing set up and mainframe utilization. Mainframe Express allows us to replicate our mainframe in a Windows environment, enabling developers to set up repeatable tests and greatly reducing the amount of time it currently takes to completely test any of our mainframe applications. Our next step will be to explore the use of SOA and the movement of entire systems to the Windows environment.“

About the company

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com

Contact details

Dan Gaffney
LEWIS PR
617-226-8844
dang@lewispr.com

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