The standardization of COBOL helps ensure the portability of both software code and skills. This contributes to the longevity of COBOL and its written applications while extending COBOL's capabilities and reinforcing its position as a highly stable and reliable language.

"Standards such as these are of great value to executives who must always look toward minimizing computing risk and maximizing return on investment," said Tony Hill, Micro Focus' president and chief executive officer. "As the first vendor to demonstrate its support for the COBOL 2002 language, we are also committed to maximizing its efficiency by providing the complementary tools required to support the computing needs of today's businesses."

Analyst firm Gartner estimates that applications managing about 85 percent of the world's business data are written in COBOL. Gartner further estimates that there are approximately 90,000 COBOL programmers in the U.S. and the annual growth of COBOL code over the next four years is 5 billion lines. These statistics, coupled with the new COBOL 2002 standard, underscore the market value for COBOL products and services, such as those offered by Micro Focus. Micro Focus capitalizes on the prevalence of legacy applications written in COBOL by helping companies to protect their existing technology investments by transforming legacy systems into Internet- and client/server-ready applications.

COBOL 2002 adds significant new features to the COBOL language including:

• User Defined Functions
• Object Orientation
• National Characters ? Unicode
• Multiple Currency Symbols
• Conditional Compilation
• Cultural Adaptability (Locales)
• Dynamic Memory Allocation
• Data Validation Using New VALIDATE Verb
• Binary and Floating Point Data Types
• User Definition of Data Types

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus is an industry leader in COBOL development solutions spanning traditional maintenance and program understanding to business rule mining, Web-enablement and user-interface transformation. With 70,000 licensed users at more than 7,000 sites around the world, Micro Focus offers broad platform support, performance and scalability, and a comprehensive suite of development and integration environments to help customers succeed in taking full advantage of the power of their legacy systems. Founded in 1976, Micro Focus is a global company that employs more than 450 people worldwide, with principal offices in the United Kingdom and United States. For more information, visit www.microfocus.com.

Micro Focus, Revolve, Mainframe Express and Net Express are registered trademarks of Micro Focus International Ltd. Server Express is a trademark of Micro Focus International Ltd. All non-Micro Focus products mentioned in this announcement are property of their respective owners.