Hollywood Video Gives Its Customers 'Star Treatment' with New Point of Sale System from Micro Focus.

ROCKVILLE, Md. & NEWBURY, England -- Micro Focus[R] (LSE:MCRO.L), a leading provider of core system application development and deployment solutions, today announces that Hollywood Entertainment, an industry leading video and video game superstore retailer, has successfully implemented a new point-of-sale system that reuses existing COBOL-based business logic. By implementing the new system on time, Hollywood saved significant money by making it more cost-effective and enabling the IT department to meet internal financial goals.

Hollywood had tried several times to rewrite its DOS-based COBOL point-of-sale (POS) application, of some 1.3 million lines of code. Faced with a partially rewritten application and a looming deadline, the organization realized they could save money and meet their financial goals by recompiling the existing application using the latest core systems development and deployment technology from Micro Focus. Hollywood found they could port their existing application, which was running out of memory on obsolete hardware, to the latest Windows-based servers running consumer grade hardware.

Using Micro Focus technology to create the updated application 'in a box', Hollywood successfully rolled out its new POS system in less than 8 months on 15,000 PCs used by more than 23,000 customer service representatives.

"After we attempted to rewrite our entire POS system, Micro Focus came to us with a solution that not only reused existing and proven business logic, but also enabled Hollywood Entertainment to meet financial objectives of making the system more cost effective," said Martin Tromblee, development manager of store systems, Hollywood Entertainment. "I had complete confidence in the Micro Focus product support team. They came to us and worked closely with us to quickly solve any technical issues in deploying our new POS system."

The modernized application, developed with Micro Focus Net Express[R] for development on Windows, allowed the DOS-based system to move to Windows servers with virtually no recoding. The new POS system can process transactions in one second or less and the core COBOL application can interface with .NET to provide a more contemporary user interface.

"Organizations are no longer faced with the dilemma of having to throw away business critical assets in order to modernize these well proven systems," said Stuart McGill, vice president of worldwide marketing at Micro Focus. "Hollywood Entertainment is recognizing the performance increases, as well as substantial cost savings, by modernizing proven systems in a COBOL-based platform."

"Companies that take advantage of core system re-use are really making sound decisions about their IT infrastructure," said Ron Exler, vice president of research, Robert Frances Group. "Exposing COBOL assets to the .NET framework and other contemporary platforms and languages, enables these companies to move proven assets without the undue risk of 'rip and replace'."

Micro Focus - Unlocking the Value of Legacy[TM]

Micro Focus is a leading provider of legacy development and deployment software for enterprise platforms. Micro Focus enables organizations to reduce costs and increase agility with minimal risk by reusing their legacy applications with contemporary architectures and Web services. Founded in 1976, Micro Focus is a global company with principal offices in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and Japan. For more information, visit www.microfocus.com.

Micro Focus and Net Express are registered trademarks and Server Express, Micro Focus Server and Unlocking the Value of Legacy are trademarks of Micro Focus. All other products mentioned in this announcement are trademarks of their respective owners.