LAS VEGAS, Dec. 8 -- Micro Focus, the leading provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, today launched its Enterprise Cloud Services strategy. Extensive cost reduction and business innovation awaits those organizations that harness Micro Focus Cloud Services to rapidly extend their core business processes and applications onto the cloud platform of their choice.

The enterprise applications that can benefit from cloud computing account for 70-80 percent of all business-related transactions, estimated at more than 30 billion per day. Harnessing and exploiting these transactions in the cloud will fundamentally change the economics of IT, freeing non-discretionary expenditure back into the economy, fueling business growth and delivering new routes to market. It is Micro Focus' unique capability that will enable organizations to capitalize on new business models without the need to replace or rewrite the enterprise applications typically written in COBOL and with minimal operational risk to the business.

"We believe that cloud-based architectures will deliver significant and sustained benefit to our customers, accelerating the modernization of their business processes, and extending the use of today's enterprise applications to reach the global market" said Stuart McGill, CTO of Micro Focus. "With our Enterprise Cloud Services, we can truly evolve the way enterprises consume IT."

The underlying concept of cloud computing is the ability to run applications wherever an organization wants to run them, regardless of backend infrastructure or platform. Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services are designed to work with all major cloud computing platforms, setting a new standard for open virtualization practices. This approach maximizes customer choice and enables enterprises to exploit the business and economic values of the cloud while building their applications with familiar development tools, languages, frameworks, and infrastructures.

"Micro Focus continues to be a leader in advancing the true value of Enterprise COBOL applications with forward looking technologies from Microsoft," said Dino Chiesa, director of product management for the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. "Taking advantage of our cloud computing initiative is the next logical step in the evolution of Micro Focus' Application Modernization Solution offering -- creating new business benefits and lower cost of ownership, increasing the value of these solutions for our customers."

Companies can derive dramatic economic benefit and increased agility through application modernization today. Coupling this with Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services customers can realize the potential of up to 90 percent cost savings of running their applications in cloud computing.

The launch of Enterprise Cloud Services follows Micro Focus' announcement to deliver enterprise COBOL to Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. These are the first in a series of cloud computing announcements from Micro Focus as the company further rolls out its Enterprise Cloud Services. To learn more about Enterprise Cloud Services, register to attend Micro Focus World 2009, taking place May 11-13 in Dallas: www.microfocusworld.com/.

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers' business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information, visit www.microfocus.com.