Astera Centerprise Connector for COBOL Helps Business Access Data in Legacy Systems

ENCINO, Calif., March 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Astera Software, a leading provider of data integration solutions through its Centerprise Data Integration platform, announces the release of its Centerprise Connector for COBOL, one of the oldest and most widely used programming languages by enterprises and government organizations.

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Centerprise Connector for COBOL provides the ability to integrate data housed in legacy systems into newer applications that allow for greater access to and more flexible use of information for business decision makers. By eliminating the need for hard to find COBOL programming skills and providing a graphical infrastructure able to scale and manage the amount of data stored in mainframe computers, Centerprise helps make COBOL data integration problems affordable and efficient.

Ibrahim Surani, President and CEO of Astera, says, "COBOL is estimated to power more than 30 billion transactions every day at large corporations, government offices and infrastructure providers. IT can be in a balancing act of protecting access to these critical systems, and providing business analysts with the information they need to improve efficiencies."

"Centerprise Connector for COBOL makes it easy to port information to new systems or build a bridge between these legacy systems and business applications that provides information while keeping the systems safe."

The COBOL language is over 50 years old, presenting a significant challenge in acquiring programming knowledge and driving up the price of COBOL integration projects requiring coding. The Centerprise Connector for COBOL enables rapid and affordable integration and synchronization of data with internal and external applications and databases without programming.

Centerprise Connectors include pre-configured workflows as well as dataflows that enable the Centerprise Integration engine to communicate quickly and easily with specific enterprise business applications, like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks and more, as well as with industry leading databases, data warehouses, and technologies such as EDI and web services.

Centerprise Connector for COBOL automatically builds a schema by parsing COBOL record definitions and provides the capability to visually specify layouts when a COBOL copybook is not available. The Connector provides support for key COBOL constructs including: REDEFINES, OCCURS and OCCURS DEPENDING, conversion for numeric types including COMP, COMP-1, COMP-2, COMP-3, COMP-4, Zoned Decimal and more. In addition the Connector can read files in any encoding including ASCII and EBCDIC.

Centerprise's parallel processing engine delivers the performance and scalability to efficiently process large data volumes. Its open architecture and 100 percent .NET 4.0 APIs make it both customizable and extensible. Centerprise works in native 64-bit mode providing performance and scalability to deliver performance faster than that of other enterprise architectures in real-time scenarios.

About Astera Software

Astera Software is a leading provider of data integration solutions. Astera is focused on eliminating complexities in integration processes through continuous innovation.

Astera's Centerprise Solutions enable organizations to complete their integration and migration projects more quickly and easily by using Centerprise Data Integrator and pre-configured Centerprise Connectors, created for project and business needs. Astera's flexible and extendable Centerprise platform is fast becoming the platform of choice for medium and large enterprises and government agencies. An innovative parallel processing architecture and smart optimizations enable Centerprise to meet the needs of large enterprise scale data integration projects.

For more information, please visit www.astera.com

Astera Software, Centerprise and Centerprise Connectors are registered trademarks of Astera Software. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Astera Software