San Jose, Calif., March 5, 2002 - Fujitsu Software Corporation, a leading supplier of COBOL compilers and tools, presented a case study today at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference detailing a project that enabled San Diego City Schools (SDCS) to migrate its existing COBOL mainframe applications to a PC network. More than 2,000 programs (including 500 online CICS applications) and 10,000 data files were moved in a migration that was widely believed to be impossible or too labor intensive to accomplish.

Fujitsu COBOL was employed to help California's second largest school district move three major systems to a PC network: student administrative systems for 1,800 end users; payroll for 25,000 employees; and finance for 1,000 end users, which included accounts payable and purchasing.

"It used to be said that it wasn't feasible to migrate programs from a mainframe environment to a PC network," said Howard Hinman, of Hinman Consulting Corp., who oversaw the project for Fujitsu. "Fujitsu sent a set of tools into this challenging environment where compatibility was an issue. In the end, very little code in the batch systems was changed and the COBOL tool set made it easy to search and make changes when they were necessary. The COBOL source code debugger and strong testing environment offered by Fujitsu additionally allowed SDCS' programming staff to examine the execution characteristics of programs - some dating back to the 1960's - to comprehend the logic and more easily make needed changes."

Hinman added, "We were also indebted to Bruce Zupek, a consultant from Silver Bullet, who contributed significant Y2K solutions and MVS expertise. Bruce's expertise allowed SDCS to overcome a number of issues raised in the various application migrations."

"This was a project that some people said couldn't be done," said Paul Gustafson, Systems Development Coordinator, San Diego City Schools. "Thanks to Fujitsu Software Corporation, we were able to leverage our initial investment in COBOL into a cost effective, efficient system that can serve us well into the 21st century."

Phase one of the project involved completion of SDCS's Y2K remediation. SDCS also used this opportunity to convert their mainframe EBCDIC data and logic into native PC ASCII, allowing them to maximize both performance and integration with other PC-based facilities. While Fujitsu COBOL provides excellent VSAM compatibility for indexed data files, the district also chose to migrate several key VSAM files to Microsoft's SQL Server, providing new functionality to their applications. Fujitsu COBOL's support for SQL made this effort feasible. In the end, many of their applications executed faster on PCs and PC servers than they had previously executed on the mainframe.

"The San Diego City Schools project is just one more example of the viability of COBOL in the 21st century," said Ron Langer, Director of Languages for Fujitsu Software Corporation. "We're pleased to be able to count SDCS among the many successful modernization implementations that make it possible for our customers to take advantage of their existing code and programming expertise."

Invented 41 years ago to provide a programming environment that helped business users create powerful applications, COBOL continues to meet and exceed the business application demands of the 21st century.

Fujitsu COBOL and PowerCOBOL can both be used to port existing legacy COBOL applications to the PC environment. These applications often perform better in this environment, freeing mainframes and midrange systems for other tasks. In addition, Fujitsu COBOL systems are easily adaptable to the Internet platform, with minimal changes. The programming language's longevity and durability ensures that such Internet integration projects are achievable by IT departments that use COBOL systems.

The Fujitsu COBOL and PowerCOBOL products are available in three packages: Standard, Professional and Enterprise. For detailed information about Fujitsu COBOL visit http://www.netcobol.com or send an email to cobol@adtools.com.

About Fujitsu Software Corporation
Fujitsu Software Corporation, based in San Jose, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited. Fujitsu Software Corporation leverages Fujitsu's international scope and expertise in developing and providing information technology solutions. Fujitsu Software Corporation's products include INTERSTAGE™, e-business infrastructure software that includes the INTERSTAGE Application Server and INTERSTAGE i-Flow, and Fujitsu COBOL. The INTERSTAGE Application Server enables enterprises to build and run mission critical applications. The INTERSTAGE i-Flow Business Process Management Platform empowers enterprises to manage business processes and business process change. Fujitsu COBOL is a COBOL development environment and suite of tools to build fast, mission-critical business systems on open platforms, including Microsoft's .NET Framework. For more information, visit http://www.fsw.fujitsu.com.

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