Micro Focus has extended its 'Lift and Shift' legacy Cobol migration service, adding the option of migrating CICS-based mainframe Cobol applications to HP and IBM Unix and Linux servers.

The company's set of development and migration tools are used by systems integrators to assist what can be a very complex process migrating between operating systems.

"It is a platform-agnostic message and it opens the door to web services," Irving Abraham, Unix product director at Micro Focus, told vnunet.com.

Cobol source code is recompiled with compiler redirects that emulate mainframe functions on the target system, and IBM's EBCDIC character set on CICS systems is converted to ASCII.

Systems integrators provide expertise for migrating such things as databases and system-specific assembler code.

"The customer pays the systems integrator for the service. The integrator provides and owns the tooling and, after completion, he can continue to earn revenue from ongoing support," said Abraham.

The Micro Focus Enterprise Server also provides a development and runtime environment on the target system. This supports the addition of XML and web services, for example, to meet service-oriented architecture needs.

For HP, the service is available immediately for HP Superdome and Integrity Itanium 64-bit servers running HP-UX, plus Linux on 32-bit Intel.

But a two-month delay is likely before Micro Focus releases its Server Express product supporting Linux on HP 64-bit systems.

For IBM, Micro Focus Enterprise Server runs on Linux partitions on eServer zSeries mainframes, Power PC-based pSeries running AIX (Unix) and xSeries Intel-based Linux systems.

Micro Focus' main systems integrators for HP are BluePhoenix Solutions and HP Consulting. On IBM, major integrators are IBM Global Services, CSC and EDS.

CICS to Windows Lift and Shift migration was announced in April and a similar programme is available for IBM zSeries mainframes.

Abraham said that the company was considering other legacy mainframe environments such as HP (Digital) VMS-based systems.