The following announcement was made today, 3/28:

 
SUN AND MICRO FOCUS SIGN AGREEMENT TO OFFER 
HIGH-PERFORMANCE COBOL PRODUCTS FOR SUN PLATFORMS 
 
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --March 28, 1989-- Sun Microsystems and Micro
Focus today announced the signing of an agreement in which Micro Focus
will develop and support versions of its Micro Focus COBOL/2(TM) native
code generating compilers for the Sun-4(TM), a high-performance RISC
family built on SPARC, as well as for the Sun-3(TM) and Sun386i(TM).
Micro Focus will market the new products exclusively on an OEM basis.
In addition, Sun and Micro Focus will participate in joint development
of future COBOL products.

"Our leading customers are asking for Micro Focus COBOL/2 on Sun
workstations and servers," stated Dr. Eric Schmidt, vice president of
the General Systems Group at Sun. "This strategic agreement with Micro
Focus gives our systems important new functionality that will help
broaden our market."

The Micro Focus code generation technology will allow Micro Focus
COBOL/2 for the Sun-4 to be easily adapted to any other SPARC-based
system. "Our OEM customers have been increasingly requesting our
product for SPARC," explained Paul Adams, president of the Computer
Industry Division of Micro Focus. "Thus we are adopting SPARC as a
standard architecture, joining the 68000 and 80086."

Applauding the support of SPARC by Micro Focus is SPARC International
Inc., an organization of hardware and software vendors committed to the
SPARC architecture. One of the goals of SI is promoting application
software products for SPARC-based systems.

"We believe that the new Micro Focus COBOL/2 compilers will help open
up important new areas for SPARC," noted Peter Van Cuylenburg,
president of the computer systems business of Texas Instruments, which
is a member of SPARC International.

Micro Focus COBOL/2 provides an "industrial strength" development
environment that supports a wide variety of COBOL standards and
dialects. Micro Focus COBOL/2 fully conforms to the high level of the
ANSI 85 and ANSI 74 standards and is compliant with the X/OPEN Common
Applications Environment specifications for COBOL. It supports a rich
set of dialects including IBM OS/VS, IBM VS COBOL II, IBM COBOL/2 and
IBM Systems Application Architecture COBOL. In addition, Micro Focus
COBOL/2 supports versions of RM/COBOL and Data General Interactive
COBOL dialects.

Micro Focus, founded in 1976, is a worldwide leader and pioneer in the
development of COBOL compilers and productivity tools. The company is
the UNIX market's leading supplier of COBOL.

Sun Microsystems is the world's leading supplier of network-based
distributed computing systems, including professional workstations,
servers, and UNIX operating system and productivity software.