Micro Focus International Ltd. (Micro Focus(R)), a leading global enterprise development company for legacy systems, today announced at the IBM PartnerWorld 2002 conference in San Francisco that Micro Focus will provide COBOL support for IBM's recently released IBM eServer zSeries Linux-only mainframe. With this agreement, Micro Focus will build and market COBOL for Linux on zSeries, using its Server Express(TM) product as the basis for the first version to be available in September 2002. By using Server Express for Linux on zSeries, customers can consolidate applications currently running on multiple platforms onto a single server thereby reducing their maintenance and administrative efforts.

"With 70 percent of business running on COBOL, it is vitally important that we work with partners such as Micro Focus who are synonymous with COBOL development. Server Express is an important development tool for many new and existing applications and our customers will be delighted with the increased flexibility they will have as they migrate to the new IBM eServer zSeries offering for Linux," said Joann Duguid Director of IBM Linux zSeries Marketing for IBM.

Recent research from Gartner estimates that 70 companies have production work running under Linux on the mainframe, with several hundred more evaluating the operating system. Gartner further believes that Linux on the mainframe has moved from an outsider in the data center to a credible offering for select environments and represents IBM's best opportunity to capture new workloads for its mainframe business-both within the enterprise and with Internet service providers.(1)

"We are very excited about continuing our partnership with IBM and helping them efficiently migrate customers from disparate platforms to leading-edge Linux technology," said Tony Hill, president and chief executive officer of Micro Focus. "The need for COBOL migration tools further underscores our commitment to the future of COBOL as a viable and lasting technology that will exist side-by-side with the newer and exciting technologies of Java, Web-services, XML and the like."

This announcement continues Micro Focus's COBOL commitment to IBM as Server Express has already been ported to IBM's AIX 5L operating system to support the IBM Power architecture. This has enabled customers to utilize this powerful development platform for enterprise and e-business applications.

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 unsurpassed breadth of platform support, performance and scalability, and the most 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.

(1) Source: Gartner FirstTake (FT-15-3528), "IBM Uses Linux to Capture More Mainframe Workloads," by Mike Chuba and John Phelps, Jan. 28, 2002.