Unless you've worked in an intensive mainframe environment, you probably don't really appreciate how deeply entrenched in businss the world of IBM and SNA remains to this day. Mainframes are still a huge business, but as distributed processing has matured, many companies look to move to other platforms and escaping the capital cots of maintaining big iron solutions. The biggest benefit to shifting environments is probably the switch to buing server appliances.

IRI, The CoSort Company, Joins the
Mainframe Migration Alliance

CoSort helps move legacy systems to more agile platforms

MELBOURNE, Fla. (June 3, 2008) -- Innovative Routines International Inc. (IRI), The CoSort Company, (www.iri.com) has joined the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA), a group of companies working to help enterprises migrate mainframe processing to the Microsoft® Platform. IRI provides a number of software products that delivers mainframe functionality and performance on the Microsoft platform including, high-volume data sorting and conversion, test data generation, field-level security, database extraction, and batch reporting.

"We're extremely pleased to welcome IRI to the MMA. IRI's proven legacy migration technology adds value and agility for customers in their move to a more cost effective Microsoft platform," said Spyros Sakellariadis PhD, director, Mainframe and Midrange Alliance Programs at Microsoft Corporation.

"When migrating z/OS and z/VSE processes, it is critical to implement a seamless replacement for JCL steps and parameters for sorting, selection, and summing. Additionally, runtimes must be at least equivalent and output results must be identical to the legacy platform," observed Ray Corriveau, Alliance Manager for IRI. "IRI's high-performance CoSort software includes drop-in sort replacement engines and JCL sort card conversion tools that seamlessly replace third-party sort functions and translate legacy sort parameters to CoSort programs on Windows."

CoSort also performs high-speed file and data type conversions. CoSort reads COBOL copybooks, CSV, CLF and ELF web logs, and translates ISAM, MFVL, Vision, LDIF, XML and sequential files. CoSort data type conversions include EBCDIC to ASCII, integer to currency, packed or zoned decimal to binary integers, European to ISO timestamps, floating point to numeric, and multi-byte Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) sets.

About IRI, The CoSort Company
Founded in 1978, IRI is headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, and represented in over 30 international locations. IRI's suite of data manipulation products are based on a best-of-breed, parallel processing technology and proprietary algorithms that deliver optimal performance for data integration, migration, and protection. Visit www.iri.com or call 1-800-333-SORT for information.

About the Mainframe Migration Alliance
Formed in spring 2003, the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a group of companies that are working together to help customers migrate workloads off of the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. The Alliance represents a group of companies that have their interests aligned in making legacy modernization easier and more efficient for customers.
Visit www.MainframeMigration.org