Micro Focus signs with Microsoft's Azure

Micro Focus has said that applications developed using its implementation of COBOL will be able to work with the Microsoft Azure Service Platform.

The aim is for the two companies to deliver applications running Micro Focus software as software-plus-services on the Microsoft platform.

Micro Focus and Microsoft say that this will further develop the technology road-map that the two companies announced in July. They believe it will enables organisation to "move existing enterprise COBOL applications into the cloud either as private cloud services, available only to that company, or as cloud applications available to the marketplace as a whole," Micro Focus said in a statement on Tuesday. The overall aim is to accelerate application deployment, the company said in a statement.

The announcement by Micro Focus is one of the first announcements of new software that is built to work with Azure and might be considered appropriate as Azure will be able to work with large scale implementations of software applications and COBOL. Although Micro Focus started life as a developer of software languages and tools for small scale computers it now is used in large applications.