NetCOBOL, Neo Product Lines Provide Fujitsu Spinoff with Underpinnings for another Solid Year
BEND, Oregon, Dec. 21, 2010 – Marking its second year as an independent software company, Alchemy Solutions today cited a significant increase in activity in the legacy modernization and migration market as one of the key drivers for its continuing, unbridled growth. The provider of legacy modernization solutions for the Microsoft .NET Framework spun-off from Fujitsu in December 2008, and finishes 2010 with accelerating growth in both its customer and partner communities.
Alchemy Solutions product line includes the NEO family of tools; the company is also the U.S. distributor of the Fujitsu NetCOBOL line of highly reliable COBOL compilers. Ever aware of the long-term importance of COBOL-based systems in the enterprise software market, customers have quickly recognized that Alchemy continues to deliver value by reducing the total cost of ownership while exploiting the capabilities of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.
In 2009, the first year after its formation from the Legacy Modernization group at Fujitsu, Alchemy Solutions tripled the company’s size, and launched a major new partnership program. In 2010, Alchemy Solutions achieved a 20 percent increase in sales over 2009, and increased its investment in talent in order to cope with unprecedented inquiries and orders from new and existing customers.
The company’s additions to its management team include Don McCormick, who joined the company as vice president of sales, to support the ever-growing channel. With more than 24 years of sales and business development experience in the technology sector, McCormick came to Alchemy Solutions from ATERAS, which is an active member of the Alchemy Solutions channel partner program.
Among its 2010 milestones, Alchemy Solutions:
* Received a Sales Momentum Award from Microsoft, recognizing the company’s accomplishments in helping organizations save money and increase agility by modernizing mainframe applications and data.
* Collaborated with Microsoft and Idea Integration in hosting an executive IT summit that explored migrating mainframe applications to more efficient platforms. Held at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, the summit featured a presentation by Gartner Research Vice President Dale Vecchio, on the state of the mainframe modernization market.
* Partnered with Microsoft and BizLogica on a mainframe modernizing seminar for European enterprises, helping then consider whether to migrate to more cost-effective platforms. Massimo Pezzini, vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research, addressed the workshop, which was held in Milan, to discuss technology and business trends that are accelerating the shifting of workloads.
* Expanded and solidified relationships with members of its partner program, including ExperSolve, Inc., a leader in legacy migration services; and added its first partner in Finland, the Finnish Support Center, Ltd. (FSC), a migration services company based in Helsinki.
* Released significant new versions or updates to its product line, including:
o NeoBatch, the batch migration solution for bringing mainframe JCL to the Windows/.NET environment;
o NeoKicks, which provides a wizard that takes CICS COBOL programs and associated BMS maps, converts them to the .NET-compatible forms, and populates a Visual Studio project for building and testing migrated code; and,
o NeoServices, a Windows-based system for service-enabling mainframe business logic and integrating with modern application and web environments.
“During a time when other companies are facing either technical or business challenges, this has been a most important year for Alchemy Solutions,” said Don McCormick, vice president of sales and global alliances for Alchemy Solutions. “The growth in our partner program, coupled with the ongoing customer successes, as documented by the Microsoft Sales Momentum award, underscore the value of our technology in serving this vibrant mainframe modernization and migration market.”
Third-party affirmation of Alchemy Solutions business value abounded, with three of the most notable being:
* Unify chose technology from Alchemy Solutions and ATERAS to migrate more than 20 business critical COBOL and Natural/ADABAS applications at a large State agency to Microsoft’s C# and the SQL Server platform; and,
* As a harbinger of things to come, the United Transportation Union (UTU) turned to the company in a strategic move to unplug the UTU mainframe and migrate to Microsoft .NET. UTU is using NeoData, NeoKicks, and NeoBatch to adapt data and applications from an IBM 9000 series VSE mainframe and convert them to the .NET framework.
* Progress continued on a huge migration with SDC, which had decided to move its core banking system from a mainframe to a more modern platform, after previously using Java and software from BEA Systems. “When we compared all of the possible solutions, we found that the Microsoft .NET Framework is more open in terms of the programming languages it supports,” explained Robert Elgaard, chief technology officer at SDC. “And by using Fujitsu NetCOBOL for .NET, we could instantly compile 80 percent of our existing mainframe software.” SDC has begun to design and test its solution, which will run in parallel with the mainframe until 2012—when the implementation is complete.
A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Alchemy Solutions’ market-leading software preserves and extends customer investments in their legacy mainframe systems by modernizing applications during the process of being migrated to the .NET environment.
