MBT launches language conversion software

Telecom software major Mahindra-British Telecom (MBT) has launched language
conversion software, which facilitates fully automated conversion of outdated
computer programs to programming languages. The company has applied for a patent
for this software in the US and the application for the same is currently
pending.

"For its first customer, a Scandinavian telecommunications company,
where manual conversion would have taken 75 man-years, MBT's converter, with
10 specialists modified the interfaces inside just six months - less than 10% of
the time originally scheduled. MBT completed automatic conversion of one million
of lines of source code in less than a single day," said head of MBT's
programming languages group Raj Chittar.

The Gartner Group estimates that 70% of all business and commercial
applications are based on the mainframe language, Cobol. Sales and Marketing
Executive VP of MBT Europe, Achim Giehr said, "For many companies, this
software is a major liability and a serious risk. Providers of programming
languages are gradually terminating their support for older products and
frequently only few staff are familiar with the structure and architecture of
the legacy systems. Further, it is increasingly difficult to find specialists
with knowledge of phased-out programming languages."

Where manual conversion throws up numerous sources of error and requires
expensive testing and correction, the system converts the software on a
one-to-one basis. Raj said, "In just 15 days, the customer had completely
tested, accepted, and released the converted embedded C software."

However, faster and less costly conversion is not the only benefit of
complete automation as MBT was also able to solve security problems as well. He
further explained, "Once we adapted the interfaces, our converter
translated the software without MBT ever seeing the actual source code. The MBT
converter offers zero-error quality. "

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