June 3, 2008–Melbourne, FL: Innovative Routines International Inc has joined the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA), a group of companies working to help enterprises migrate mainframe processing to the Microsoft Platform. IRI provides a number of software products that delivers mainframe functionality and performance on the Microsoft platform including, high-volume data sorting and conversion, test data generation, field-level security, database extraction, and batch reporting.

"We’re extremely pleased to welcome IRI to the MMA. IRI’s proven legacy migration technology adds value and agility for customers in their move to a more cost effective Microsoft platform," said Spyros Sakellariadis PhD, director, mainframe and midrange alliance programs at Microsoft Corporation.

“When migrating z/OS and z/VSE processes, it is critical to implement a seamless replacement for JCL steps and parameters for sorting, selection, and summing. Additionally, runtimes must be at least equivalent and output results must be identical to the legacy platform,” observed Ray Corriveau, alliance manager for IRI. “IRI's high-performance CoSort software includes drop-in sort replacement engines and JCL sort card conversion tools that seamlessly replace third-party sort functions and translate legacy sort parameters to CoSort programs on Windows.”

CoSort also performs high-speed file and data type conversions. CoSort reads COBOL copybooks, CSV, CLF and ELF web logs, and translates ISAM, MFVL, Vision, LDIF, XML and sequential files. CoSort data type conversions include EBCDIC to ASCII, integer to currency, packed or zoned decimal to binary integers, European to ISO timestamps, floating point to numeric, and multi-byte Chinese, Japanese and Korean sets.