Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Robert Barnes, CEO at Jazz Software:
Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe Jazz Software?
A: MANASYS Jazz is programming software, designed especially for companies that have a legacy of COBOL systems developed for mainframe computers.
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Q: What is your backstory? How did your company come into being?
A: Jazz Software Ltd, was formed about seven years ago when I was contacted by a former user of the Fujitsu product. The email conversation went more or less: –
“Are you the guy that developed MANASYS?”
“Yes, why do you ask?”
“I used it when I was working with Fujitsu. It was one of the best programming systems I’ve ever used. Do you have an IBM version?”
I didn’t, but I was retired and bored. I didn’t want to just replicate the Fujitsu product: I knew that Windows hosting could produce something spectacular: much more flexible, more integrated, and more productive than earlier mainframe products. MANASYS Jazz is delivered as a Windows program, but it generates code for z/OS and other enterprise environments, and could easily be developed to use languages other than COBOL and systems other than z/OS and Micro Focus
Q: What exactly is Jazz?
A: Jazz is programming software that uses powerful data definitions to create programs very simply, in a fraction of the time and cost that would be required with COBOL, Java, or other programming technology. COBOL and SQL definitions can be read into Jazz, additional properties added to make the definitions more powerful, and then reports, web services, and other program types quickly generated. Productivity ratios (lines of Jazz/lines of COBOL, JCL, WSDL, BMS etc) from 20:1 up are common.
Our website, hosts videos showing some of what Jazz can do, and how, and this page shows how easy it is to create powerful web services.
Q: Why is now the time for a solution like yours?
A: Program development is becoming more and more complex, and the legacies of tomorrow will be even more complex and harder to maintain than the legacies of today with the move to distributed systems communicating with web services. We badly need solutions that don’t just add another interface layer, but take aim at the real problem, system complexity.
Legacy COBOL systems still run the world’s commerce, yet COBOL skills are in short supply and expensive. Attempts to move off COBOL to Java and other newer technologies have proven expensive and risky. Companies adopting MANASYS Jazz not only reduce their programming costs and extend their scarce COBOL skills, they will have a low risk evolutionary approach to application modernization that has a real chance of reducing their future maintenance costs.
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Q: Who are your clients? What challenges are you helping them solve?
A: We are seeking to establish an initial market. We already provide innovative solutions to issues like developing web services that manage updates. We are willing to work with clients to extend Jazz into new areas and solve new problems as well. For example, an initial client used our software for a data conversion project: for them we developed the Data Mapping and Conversion facilities.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We can take MANASYS Jazz in many exciting directions: the directions we choose will be the result of discussion with our clients. We are particularly interested in opportunities to provide solutions beyond the enterprise/COBOL world, for example developing both server-side and client-side web service logic, probably using Java or C# (not COBOL) to provide client-side data validation.
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