Member Article

Micro focus brings the mainframe to iPads with Rumba+ Mobile

Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO.L), a leading provider of enterprise application modernization, testing and management solutions, today announced the availability of Rumba+ Mobile on iPad, the first terminal emulator and user interface (UI) modernization application for tablet devices. The new solution enables organizations to quickly modernize green-screen applications on mobile devices. The newly presented interfaces quickly improve the end user experience, boost productivity and bring a modern look and feel to legacy business applications, all without the need to change application code or use specialist development skills.

The Rumba+ Mobile terminal emulator offers a native iPad client application, taking full advantage of iOS functionalities. It turns green-screen applications into touch-screen apps, with integrated and customizable gestures capabilities or skins, in addition to the use of controls such multi green-screen tables, tabs, images calendars, drop down menus and much more. iPad gestures are also fully integrated and can be customized to interact with the host or to control the terminal emulation session.

According to Gartner, Inc. in a recent report “2013 is the year many organizations woke up to the imperative to do something about mobile”[1]. But according to Kevin Brearley, Director of Product Management at Micro Focus: “The need for mobile apps is challenging the agility of many critical legacy applications today. Traditional 3270 and 5250 or “green-screen” applications are a good example of this. They can be considered out-dated, difficult to learn and navigate for today’s modern user. This not only frustrates employees, but often affects a business’ customer service. In trying to bring these applications forward, organizations often rewrite the entire green screen application, or adopt a middleware solution that connects business logic on the mainframe to the user interface. It’s time consuming and costly and can have an unacceptable time to market.

“Our innovative Rumba+ Mobile solution enables businesses to extend existing application investments through the modernization of mainframe and iSeries green-screen applications. Adopting new trends and technologies allowing mobility like this can enhance a business’ agility and ultimately their competitive advantage. We are helping organizations to improve end user productivity, shorten business process learning cycles and cut through laborious data input/retrieval processes to respond faster to market dynamics. As a result, customers will realize the benefits of increased efficiency, whilst any investments and knowledge present in the existing mainframe applications will be preserved.”

Rumba+ is part of a family of enterprise application modernization technologies from Micro Focus, which help organizations transform the value of their core business systems. In addition to Rumba+ Mobile, companies can also take advantage of Rumba+ Web to enable remote access to centralized applications through web browsers, and Rumba+ Desktop for simple but efficient improvement to their traditional Windows client view of these legacy applications.

Rumba+ Mobile apps is now available in the iTunes store.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Micro Focus .