Barker Bites Back

Micro Focus has said that applications developed using its implementation of COBOL will be able to work with the Microsoft Azure Service Platform.

The aim is for the two companies to deliver applications running Micro Focus software as software-plus-services on the Microsoft platform.

Micro Focus and Microsoft say that this will further develop the technology road-map that the two companies announced in July. They believe it will enables organisation to "move existing enterprise COBOL applications into the cloud either as private cloud services, available only to that company, or as cloud applications available to the marketplace as a whole," Micro Focus said in a statement on Tuesday. The overall aim is to accelerate application deployment, the company said in a statement.

The announcement by Micro Focus is one of the first announcements of new software that is built to work with Azure and might be considered appropriate as Azure will be able to work with large scale implementations of software applications and COBOL. Although Micro Focus started life as a developer of software languages and tools for small scale computers it now is used in large applications.

If it is October it must be Storage Expo and the annual UK show for all things storage is back again. This year the show is dominated by the large vendors. In fact they are here in force. IBM, NetApp, HP, Hitachi Data System, Dell, Cisco are here in force. And the second tier, the likes of Larry Ellison’s Pillar, are not far behind.

And this is a busy show. On the first day it has been a little tricky just moving around. Credit crunch? What credit crunch, storage seems to be an area so crucial that even in these grim times people still feel the need to check out what it news, difference, interesting. Some of them even have some serious shopping in mind.

And there are plenty of new ideas around it seems. One of the big areas of interest seems to focus on companies with storage that is just a but more flexible than company’s are used to. Something that can help them cut down on the sheer number of disk drives they need to buy. Something that can do this whole storage thing with a but more flexibility and in a little less space.

Or for preference a lot less space.

Companies that have been catching my eye include the big guys like IBM, which it debuting its complete new range of products debuted last month and Hitachi and its new disk units, Then there are the small suppliers like Tadasoft with a new security appliance. Unusually in a show dominated by US suppler, it is a UK company. Then there are other specialists like Copan with its MAID storage. There is plenty to see and the show runs through Wednesday.