The Clock is Ticking for Customers Running Natural & Adabas on z/VSE

The final version of IBM’s z/VSE operating system will reach its end-of-service date on September 30, 2023. In their announcement, IBM “strongly suggests” that customers plan to migrateto an alternative platform prior to that date. The company plans to removez/VSE documentation from its website by September of 2026.

For customers running Adabas & Natural under VSE, this can pose a serious risk, both in terms of security vulnerabilities and potential software issues. And because VSE 6.2 is not compatible with newer software and hardware, the functionality of applications developed on SAG Natural & Adabas will be limited, as well as maintenance and support from Software AG.

Application Migration Options

Software AG is encouraging its customers to migrate to their Linux cloud option, claiming that Adabas and Natural running on VMs makes for a relatively quick and easy transition.  

But this may just be kicking the can down the road and does not address today’s challenges lack of skilled development and support staff, and the need to migrate core business systems tonewer technologies to remain business agility and competitiveness.

Events like these are opportunities to assess the current situation and determine the best strategy moving forward, as the investment to do a lift-and-shift of a legacy system may be more expensive than transitioning it to newer technologies overthe same amount of time.  

Organizations running Natural and Adabas should take this moment to assess a range of options, including refactoring to modern programming languages like C# or Java running in more cost effective platforms like private or public cloud.

Astadia provides tools that are 100% automated, with a proven track record of success. Download our free research papers on Natural to C# Transformation, Natural to Java Transformation, or Migrating from Natural to COBOL, or read an overview ofour game-changing tools for fully automated migration for z/VSE and z/OS systems.

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