Austec Inc, the San-Jose based subsidiary of portable Cobol specialist Austec International Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia, late Tuesday duly announced that it had a definitive agreement to acquire Ryan-McFarland Corp, the Rolling Hills Estates, California, developer of low-end micro Cobol and Fortran compilers. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed; the closing of the merger is expected in mid-June. Austec says that the merged company will have net 1987 revenues exceeding $25m, probably just topping Micro Focus Plc. Ryan-McFarland’s research and development, sales and marketing operations will be merged into Austec Inc, and its facilities in Rolling Hills Estates, Austin, Texas, and London will be maintained. Austec plans to begin integrating Ryan-McFarland’s line, including RM/Cobol-85 and RM/Fortran, into its own ACE networked product environment immediately. Austec’s Acenet product offers a standard interface for Cobol applications, regardless of hardware and operating system and is particularly regarded in the Unix world as a means of moving old machine-specific Cobol applications over onto new Unix systems.
