(Micro Focus International Ltd., Rockville, MD, Newbury, England) Founded in the U.K. in 1976, the company became known for its COBOL programming tools that enabled both developing on client/server platforms for the mainframe and migrating from mainframe to client/server. A shift in objectives and a corporate name change to MERANT in the late 1990s did not derail the core of the COBOL executive team, which spun off again as an independent company in 2001, retaining its leadership in transforming legacy systems from the mainframe to Internet-and client/server-ready applications. See
MERANT.