Starsoft Develops Cross-Platform Applications with Veryant isCOBOL

November 21, 2011 - Veryant, the COBOL technology innovator, today introduced a new customer, Starsoft, which chose isCOBOL Evolve to create a new cross-platform methodology for its traditional COBOL customers and enter the Unix/Linux open systems market, all while protecting its valuable legacy applications.

Starsoft, which offers professional IT services to insurance and finance companies, was looking for the next level of growth through new markets. The company sought to move beyond its traditional expertise with the IBM iSeries platform to provide services to a growing number of companies with open systems environments.

The company selected Veryant's isCOBOL technology to combine COBOL and Java for Web-based application development. This would help the company continue providing services for COBOL customers, but gain strength with companies using other platforms.

While the primary goal of the initiative was to offer vertical insurance applications on multiple platforms, there were additional benefits. These included reducing the resources required to develop applications, enabling all development work to be performed in a standard Web browser, and providing a viable option for legacy modernization.

Starsoft evaluated various technology options in the market. It selected Veryant's isCOBOL Evolve because it met multiple criteria, including 100% platform portability, convenient data access, flexibility, and support for standard Web interfaces.

isCOBOL Evolve is a complete environment for developing and deploying applications across Linux, UNIX, Microsoft Windows and Mac systems. Because the isCOBOL Runtime Environment is implemented in Java, it produces extremely portable code that simplifies integration and interoperability. isCOBOL also supports COBOL exit routines. This enabled Starsoft to maintain data integrity and modernize existing applications without changing application code.

"isCOBOL provides the best of both worlds. It protects long-standing COBOL application business logic and enables cross-platform deployment as pure Java objects through standard Web interfaces," explained Dov Keshet, CEO and founder of Starsoft.

"Developing with isCOBOL has allowed us to take a step forward in a strategic area that is critical for our growth. Before, most customers' core systems were based on the IBM's iSeries, which limited our options for company growth," Keshet explained. "In fact, our first project with isCOBOL is for a new customer using a Unix/Oracle platform."

During the project, Starsoft first built a set of internal utilities to support the application development methodology that had evolved from years of experience working with many different companies. The effort then shifted towards integration … setting up the development and runtime environments, the operating systems (both Linux and Windows), database (MySQL, Oracle and DB2), IDE (Eclipse), Java integration (JSP/Servlet model, Web Services), and the client-side user interface (CSS and JavaScript, including JQuery, and browser support).

"We had no critical issues regarding development, and never encountered anything that didn't work - or didn't even install - as we had with other products we evaluated before selecting Veryant's isCOBOL," Keshet continued. "Questions for the Veryant team were answered promptly, often within minutes. This was critical for us, as we had never ventured beyond the IBM iSeries."