Acucorp, an international provider of information technology (IT) solutions that revitalize legacy applications, today announced a technology agreement with BEA. The two companies will focus on extending legacy application assets by deploying them within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Acucorp's extend solutions and BEA WebLogic 8.1. In addition, BEA named Acucorp's ACUCOBOL-GT a certified COBOL compiler for Tuxedo 8.0 and 8.1.

"Businesses today are continually trying to lower TCO while increasing application agility. For many customers repurposing existing assets, versus a complete rewrite, can be a very cost effective approach to application modernization and enabling a Service-Oriented Architecture," said George Gould, director of Transaction Processing products at BEA. "Our alliance with Acucorp can help provide organizations with proven replatforming technologies that are designed to minimize risk while helping to improve time-to-value."

"BEA strategy and J2EE technologies can help businesses to reap the rewards of SOA as well as incorporate and reuse the business-critical, trusted OLTP legacy applications they have implemented to run their organizations," said Cameron Jenkins, vice president of Strategic Alliances for Acucorp. "BEA application integration and management approach complements Acucorp's long-standing value proposition that modernization need not come at the cost of whole-scale legacy replacement."

As part of the technology agreement, Acucorp's ACUCOBOL-GT has been named by BEA as a certified compiler for Tuxedo, which can be a critical component for organizations deploying composite OLTP applications within a SOA environment. Together, these two technologies can help companies develop, manage and deploy distributed COBOL applications in a wider variety of hardware, operating system, network and database environments.

Both BEA and Acucorp have agreed to maintain the internal licenses of one another's products, helping to making it possible for the organizations to offer support for joint customers employing the technologies together. The agreement also includes training for both BEA and Acucorp staff on their respective offerings.

Customers have already benefited from Acucorp and BEA solutions. Kookmin Bank, the second largest commercial bank in Korea, runs its business using an ACUCOBOL-GT application with BEA Tuxedo services to connect more than 50 mainframes. By extending its COBOL assets using these two technologies, Kookmin has successfully created a scalable, agile system that has exceeded customer demand.