Application Outsourcing Trends COBOL Explorer Shines Like A Beacon June 10, 2002, Boston, MA. - Reliance readies COBOL Explorer for Application Outsourcing Market.

Reliance Technology announced its intention to aggressively market COBOL Explorer for the mainframe Application Outsourcing industry.

Application Outsourcing Trends

COBOL Explorer Shines Like A Beacon

June 10, 2002, Boston, MA.
- Reliance readies COBOL Explorer for Application Outsourcing Market.

Reliance Technology announced its intention to aggressively market COBOL Explorer for the mainframe Application Outsourcing industry.

Shrinking budgets, staff-cuts, hiring freezes and talent-drain have made the business climate extremely difficult for many big corporations. They are unable to find the resources to maintain the old COBOL-based applications. More and more companies are toying with the idea of out-sourcing their application maintenance. Many of them have called in big consulting companies to out-source their IT applications lock-stock-and-barrel. "We knew this was coming.." says Ranga Nathan, the president of Reliance Technology. "The mature systems are maintained by even more mature baby-boomers many of whom are close to their retirement. The current economic circumstances dictate skillful management of resources. Out-sourcing is a great option and COBOL Explorer is a great facilitator of this," he added.

Reliance offers COBOL Explorer as a complete solution in a box for $10,000 with 30 day, no strings money-back guarantee - complete with all the necessary components: Linux, Apache and MySQL server. "The customer has to make a only small change to their compile JCL and set the IP on the box. It could not be any simpler. Yet it has the potential of saving in excess of $300,000 per annum for a mere 10 person development team. It's a no-brainer!", said Ranga Nathan.
Reliance Technology's COBOL Explorer is a web-based application that renders compiled listings as highly navigable web documents. COBOL Explorer is designed to help developers navigate, cross-reference, debug, and search, compare and recover COBOL programs. Reliance has taken an innovative approach to the limitations of the 80x24 mainframe screen by converting COBOL listings to a Web document. COBOL Explorer adds productivity aids such as hyperlinks to jump to data or a procedure reference or a definition, multiple-listing view, JCL to program cross-reference, free-text search, source archival and more.

"Legacy maintenance is a thankless and tedious task. The mainframe tools have not kept pace with technology. Yet legacy systems are the bread and butter of thousands of big corporation across the world. Even businesses wishing to move towards CRM, B2B, e-Commerce, need to continue to maintain the legacy systems. In fact, e-Commerce efforts are being built on top of the legacy systems. Enormous amounts of paper are wasted and precious time lost debugging programs while production systems are down. But if you look at the way maintenance programmers research and solve problems, not much has changed over the years. It is a fact that on the average 60% of the effort in maintenance is investigation of the problem. This is the phase where extensive navigation of existing documentation and code is required," says Ranga Nathan, president and CEO of Reliance Technology Consultants, Inc.

COBOL Explorer is installed as a Web application with no impact on the legacy systems. When a COBOL program is compiled, the output can be automatically FTPed to a local Web server for immediate processing and available for viewing within seconds!

"I have been an on-call programmer in charge of production applications. When I got those 1AM calls due to some production system being down, it took me a while to figure out the offending part of a program. JCL and programs could be deeply nested. You are under pressure from everywhere -- management, operations and users. Walking up and down programs and JCL could be very frustrating and mistakes are easily made when you are tired. When you are following a thread, continuity is very important. You need to be able to go up, down, jump, retrace, search, cross-reference and have multiple programs, multiple versions in view, something a terminal simply cannot do. Consider the fact that you may be debugging someone else's code and the author may not even be around!" says Ranga Nathan, a 30 year veteran of IT.

COBOL Explorer could bring about a direct saving of $300,000 a year for a 10-person team, not adding the savings from printing, distribution, and production downtime. That is a 30 times ROI or a break-even period of under two weeks!

COBOL Explorer runs on the inexpensive Linux/Apache platform. Customers can purchase or lease it. Reliance Technology Consultants, Inc. also offers hosted service.

"The ability to jump from program to program to JCL and still keep them all in view is tremendous. Imagine how many fingers would I need to thumb an index? I can now view development and production version of the same program side-by-side. In the event we lose a source, I simply copy and paste to get it back! Is it that easy or what?" added Ranga Nathan.

COBOL Explorer is available for an obligation-free trial. Within hours Reliance can set up an account for the customer and have their COBOL listings available via a browser!

More information is available at http://www.cobolexplorer.com.
Reliance Technology announced its intention to aggressively market COBOL Explorer for the mainframe Application Outsourcing industry.

Shrinking budgets, staff-cuts, hiring freeze and talent-drain have made situation extremely difficult for many big corporations. They are unable to find the resources to maintain the old COBOL-based applications. More and more companies are toying with the idea of out-sourcing their applications maintenance. Many of them have called in big consulting companies to out-source their IT applications lock-stock-and-barrel. "We knew this was coming.." says Ranga Nathan, the president of Reliance Technology. "The mature systems are maintained by even more mature baby-boomers many of whom are close to their retirement. The current economic circumstances dictate skillful management of resources. Out-sourcing is a great option and COBOL Explorer is a great facilitator of this." he added.
Reliance offers COBOL Explorer as a complete solution in a box for $10,000 with 30 day, no strings money back guarantee - complete with all the necessary components - Linux, Apache and MySQL server. "The customer has to make a only small change to their compile JCL and set the IP on the box. It could not be any simpler. Yet it has the potential of saving in excess of $300,000 per annum for a mere 10 person development team. It's a no-brainer!", said Ranga Nathan.
Reliance Technology's COBOL Explorer is a web-based application that renders compiled listings as highly navigable web documents. COBOL Explorer is designed to help developers navigate, cross-reference, debug, and search, compare and recover COBOL programs. Reliance has taken an innovative approach to the limitations of the 80x24 mainframe screen by converting COBOL listings to Web document. COBOL Explorer adds productivity aids such as hyperlinks to jump to data or a procedure reference or a definition, multiple-listing view, JCL to program cross-reference, free-text search, source archival and more.
"Legacy maintenance is a thankless and tedious task. The mainframe tools have not kept pace with technology. Yet legacy systems are the bread and butter of thousands of big corporation across the world. Even businesses wishing to move towards CRM, B2B, e-commerce, need to continue to maintain the legacy systems. In fact, e-commerce efforts are being built on top of the legacy systems. Enormous amounts paper are wasted and precious time lost debugging programs while production systems are down. But if you look at the way maintenance programmers research and solve problems, not much has changed over the years. It is a fact that on the average 60% of the effort in maintenance is investigation of the problem. This is the phase where extensive navigation of existing documentation and code is required," says Ranga Nathan, president and CEO of Reliance Technology Consultants, Inc.

COBOL Explorer is installed as a Web application with no impact on the legacy systems. When a COBOL program is compiled, the output can be automatically FTPed to a local Web server for immediate processing and available for viewing within seconds!.

"I have been an on-call programmer in charge of production applications. When I got those 1AM calls due to some production system being down, it took me a while to figure out the offending part of a program. JCL and programs could be deeply nested. You are under pressure from everywhere -- management, operations and users. Walking up and down programs and JCL could be very frustrating and mistakes are easily made when you are tired. When you are following a thread, continuity is very important. You need to be able to go up, down, jump, retrace, search, cross-reference and have multiple programs, multiple versions in view, something a terminal simply can not do. Consider the fact that you may be debugging someone else's code and the author may not even be around!" says Ranga Nathan, a 30 year veteran of IT.

COBOL Explorer could bring about a direct saving of $300,000 a year for a 10 person team, not adding the savings from printing, distribution, and production downtime. That is an 30 times ROI or a break-even period of under two weeks!
COBOL Explorer runs on the inexpensive Linux/Apache platform. Customers can purchase or lease it. Reliance Technology Consultants, Inc. also offers hosted service.

"The ability to jump from program to program to JCL and still keep them all in view is tremendous. Imagine how many fingers would I need to thumb an index? I can now view development and production version of the same program side by side. In the event we lose a source, I simply copy and paste to get it back! Is it that easy or what?" added Ranga Nathan.

COBOL Explorer is available for an obligation-free trial. Within hours Reliance can set up an account for the customer and have their COBOL listings available via a browser!

More information is available at http://www.cobolexplorer.com.

About Reliance Technology, Inc.
Reliance Technology Consultants, Inc. is a privately held company based in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Reliance offers products such as Any2XML (a text to XML, XHTML, database, and spreadsheet conversion and Web publishing tool), COBOL Explorer (publishes COBOL Listings on the Web for debugging and impact analysis), and ADAExplorer (publishes ADABAS report to Web and extracts statistics). Reliance is an approved supplier of IT services to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Contact:
George Manos, V. P. Operations and Marketing, Reliance Technology, Inc., 350 Broadway, Chelsea MA 02150, Phone (617) 884-9801, E-mail: Gmanos@goreliance.com