The high cost of maintaining mainframes and the popularity of modern development tools, such as Visual Studio .NET, helped to liberate CICS/COBOL from big hardware this month, as Fujitsu announced the general release of NeoKicks.

The company claims its three-month early release program gave customers a chance to see how CICS applications could cost-effectively move to Microsoft .NET with ASP.NET pages, Windows Forms, and Visual Studio .NET, using wizards.

NeoKicks is a different kind of tool than, say, HostBridge Technology's HostBridge, because HostBridge puts a Web-based front end on existing CICS applications, according to Raul Menendez, Senior Systems Engineer, Fujitsu Software Corporation, of Sunnyvale, California. Once freed by NeoKicks, Menendez says, the .NET application "Can take full advantage of the thousands of available .NET classes, to extend and enhance its functionality. And because you're in .NET, you are not necessarily bound anymore to the COBOL language. Instead, you can easily interface programs and classes written in C#, VB.NET or any other .NET language."

NeoKicks is designed to migrate applications off the mainframe and into a Windows environment. Explains Menendez, "It includes tools that convert the BMS screens to WebForms or WinForms, and it identifies the API commands within a COBOL program and replaces them with method calls to our own NeoKicks API." As part of the migration plan, you need to move the data off the mainframe as well as any batch jobs that may be related to the online system. The company also offer another product, zBatch, that allows you to host batch programs written in COBOL in the Windows environment. "Migrating entire systems off of the mainframe can save companies a significant amount of money. They no longer have to pay the costly maintenance fees for their mainframe," says Menendez.

Stockholmshem, a city-owned housing renter in Stockholm with 360 employees, had a lot of information in CICS/COBOL on an aging mainframe. Kjell Hassel of Datarutin AB, is the project manager tasked with getting it out. Datarutin has a long-standing relationship with Stockholmshem.

Right now the project is almost completed, says Hassel, as batch jobs create screens from the mainframe. He expects the finished project to go live in April. "We are very confident in this way to migrate the CICS system," said Hassel. "We looked for a solution that would allow us to continue to develop the application, and that's why we chose this." Hassel said others used wrappered code, while NeoKicks' solution was native.

"Since we have gotten this experience [with our Stockholmshem client]," Hassel continued, "We have started to look around for other mainframe customers. We have a group of people that have been servicing former COBOL customers." Hassel said he wants to put their new skills with NeoKicks to work.

Hassel sees NeoKicks as a bridge for more than just new equipment and applications. "NeoKicks sits on top of the .NET for COBOL compiler," says Hassel. "Some of the COBOL programmers have been programming in COBOL [for] ten or twenty years. When they're making the new program, they explore new features in the .NET environment. They take one step at a time — become familiar with Visual Studio.NET." They ask questions about the modern languages and experiment with them. "It's a very good way for companies to take care of their existing maintenance staffs," Hassel says.

Hassel advises other shops to "have an idea of the next step," and says, "It pays off to migrate to the new environment (in order) to develop."