Software AG today unveiled a set of software tools designed to help IT personnel in manufacturing and other types of enterprises modernize legacy applications written in Cobol and other older, third-generation languages.

The tools, called the Discovery Edition, are part of Software AG’s webMethods Application Modernization Suite product and are being resold by Software AG under a global agreement with their developer, Relativity Technologies.

The Discovery Edition tools allow developers to document and analyze existing legacy code bases originally developed using Cobol, PL/1, RPG, Visual Basic, C, C++, and Java.

While more modern packaged and in-house-developed applications tend to use newer, fourth-generation languages and techniques, such as services-oriented architectures, legacy applications written in older languages are still operating in many enterprises. Gartner has estimated, for instance, that businesses still run applications using 200 billion lines of Cobol code worldwide.

In many cases, however, those applications are poorly documented. And, in many companies, experts say, the original developers of the older applications have moved on or retired, leaving companies that rely on those applications unable to easily reengineer them for improved performance or new functionality.

Tools such as Discovery Edition can be used to analyze legacy code, fill in the documentation holes, and clean up legacy applications.

The new webMethods Discovery Edition includes the following components:

• A Modernization Workbench used to manage and store information about legacy applications.

• An Application Analyzer that discovers and catalogs information about existing code, including documentation.

• An Application Architect that can be used to eliminate non-standard code while identifying business logic for reuse.

• A Business Rules Manager, which can be used to store business logic for reuse in a more modern application.

Other products in Software AG’s Application Modernization Suite include Web Edition, which can be used to upgrade green-screen user interfaces into browser-based interfaces; SQL Edition, which provides SQL-based access to applications that use relational and non-relational data sources; and SOA Edition, which can be used to bring a services orientation to legacy applications.

Software AG purchased webMethods in 2007 to broaden its portfolio of SOA tools. Application modernization is just one node in that portfolio, which includes tools for SOA-based business activity monitoring, business intelligence, business process management, and business rules management.

The technology behind Relativity Technologies’ Discovery Edition is in use at more than 400 enterprises, mainly in financial services, healthcare, and public sector verticals, Software AG said.