Acucorp, Inc., a leading provider of legacy application modernization and extension solutions, and Oracle Corp. today announced they are offering companies the tools to facilitate migration of legacy assets from proprietary legacy platforms to a wide range of open, less expensive computing platforms. Acucorp's ACUCOBOL-GT development system has been certified for use with Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Database -- providing COBOL connectivity to Oracle's state-of-the-art products. As a result, organizations and independent software vendors (ISVs) can embed SQL statements in a host ACUCOBOL-GT program and use that program to access Oracle databases through the Oracle Pro*COBOL pre-compiler. This eliminates the need for costly application re-engineering and rewriting and allows organizations to leverage their existing IT assets, dramatically lowering their total cost of ownership and increasing their return on investment when compared to other modernization alternatives. "Oracle and Acucorp have worked closely to provide an effective way for COBOL-based applications to be migrated from legacy platforms with inefficient data stores to open system platforms and relational database technology," said Jay Peretz, vice president of Partner Technical Services for Oracle. "ACUCOBOL-GT is now certified for Oracle Database 10g, making it possible for COBOL applications to take advantage of the low cost, high reliability and security of Oracle's enterprise grid computing technology. Customers continue to leverage their existing investment in legacy applications while taking advantage of the interoperability inherent in 21st century technologies, including access from Internet and mobile devices." According to Dr. Pamela Coker, Acucorp's President and CEO, "Acucorp has a long-standing commitment to provide COBOL developers with the latest integration options and technological advancements, including support of Oracle Database products. The addition of Oracle Pro*COBOL certification and support for ACUCOBOL-GT will allow us to better serve the diverse and growing population of Acucorp-Oracle customers -- considerably strengthening our joint solution by maximizing database access and support." Using the Oracle Pro*COBOL pre-compiler, ACUCOBOL-GT programmers can create and maintain applications that manipulate Oracle data. The pre-compiler accepts the host COBOL program as input, translates the embedded SQL statements into standard COBOL CALL statements that call the Oracle libraries, and generates a source program that developers can compile and execute with the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime linked in with the Oracle libraries. In addition to providing relational database access, organizations using the Acucorp-Oracle offering may take advantage of Acucorp's entire extend(R) product suite. Highly interoperable and portable to more than 600 computing platforms -- including Linux, UNIX, and Windows -- the extend family of technologies offers innovative solutions for COBOL-based: Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture, .NET and J2EE integration (including Oracle Application Server), Web or mobile access, thin client architecture, graphical user interface design, and improved performance. By incorporating these solutions into their existing business systems, customers can both modernize and enhance their current applications -- all while avoiding the costs, risks and time typically associated with rewriting, replacing or re-engineering their legacy systems.