Platforms
Over decades, developers and system vendors have developed platforms, which are today regarded as a "last retreat" for legacy applications. Especially proprietary systems offer a unified and fully integrated development platform - an engineered system - which is usually comprised of operating system, data retention, compiler, client server etc... This has one main advantage: All its components interact intuitively and therefore contribute to stability and reliability.
But life in a proprietary box comes at a price: it binds to the system vendor, locks the customer system out of the dynamics of open software development and offers very little technical and economical flexibility.
We are devoted to bringing the freedom of choice back to our customers, allowing them to take full advantage of open solutions and drastically reduce operating costs. The stability of the new system is on par with the legacy system because core functionalities remain untouched.
Don Fitzgerald, EasiRun Europa GmbH, Bonede Alliance Member
“We help customers escape from their platform box without having to sacrifice stability and comfort.”
Technologies
Unclear and shortsighted strategies of major manufacturers and biased media discussions have cast COBOL in an unfavourable light. For those who work with it, however, COBOL is still the most important and most appreciated development language.
COBOL is a lively, actively maintained language, and the applications written in COBOL are robust, secure and proven. Contrary to general belief, COBOL applications are by no means restricted to the environment they are embedded in or originally designed for: by providing the right know-how, legacy code can be extracted and prepared for a new environment.
Bonede Alliance offers the tools and services to subsequently document legacy software so that it can form the basis of a new environment and a new open lifecycle management that covers the aspects development, deployment, maintenance, integration and interfaces.
Bernard Zisermann, TELEBIG S.A., Bonede Alliance Member
“Today, legacy applications require a new software lifecycle management. We employ a proven strategy to document, modify and enhance legacy software.”
Applications
The applications, which are subject to migration to the cloud or to other platforms, are exclusively business applications. The applications (or major parts of them) are the technical resource that enable our customers to generate their profits.
Those applications include systems that manage internal processes (public and private institutions) or application development frameworks (software houses).
Therefore, the application of a risk free and proven migration method is vital. Bonede Alliance has got the skills, tools and experience to master these migrations.
Marco Ehrhardt, Managing Director, Ehrhardt + Partner, a highly satisfied customer
“Bonede Alliance member EasiRun enabled the migration of the core of our application to open system in a record time of less than 10 months. We are more than pleased.”
Individuals
COBOL developers are often regarded as the dinosaurs of computing. This assumption is completely wrong. And here is why: COBOL developers deal with complex and comprehensive business processes, country-specific requirements and legislations. They need to have extensive knowledge of different operating systems, different data storage systems (ISAM, RDBMS, Sequential, XML), on-line transactions, batch processing, 3GL and 4GL as well as experience with C, C++ or Java. Compared to what programmers of „modern“ languages can achieve, COBOL programmers are highly productive and produce unparalleled code quality.
So where is the challenge? As soon as new environments are in the focus of discussion, COBOL programmers often fear to become redundant.
But their skills and experience are still needed: They have very good knowledge of the business processes, the various interfaces and they know how to design faultless applications.
João de Oliveira, MigrationWare, Bonede Alliance Member
“It is essential not leave anyone behind. We bank on a close relationship with all parties involved: customer staff, partners and suppliers.”
