① Journal · Software AG
Adabas and Natural now run as a standalone business under Silver Lake ownership, separated from the integration products that were sold off. For buyers, the corporate story matters less than the operational one: the estate is too embedded to migrate and too stable to monitor, and that combination is exactly where the licensing cost quietly grows.
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Get expert help →Software AG (now Software GmbH under Silver Lake) carved Adabas and Natural out as a standalone business in early 2025, alongside ARIS, after selling its integration line including webMethods and StreamSets to IBM and divesting other products. The takeaway for a license holder is not the org chart. It is that Adabas and Natural are no longer one product family inside a sprawling software company, they are a focused business whose owners have signaled a multi year growth plan. A focused owner of a deeply embedded legacy product has every incentive to grow revenue from a captive base, and a captive base is precisely what Adabas estates are.
These are the systems running core records at banks, insurers, and governments, written in Natural against an Adabas database, often decades old and tightly woven into batch and online flows that nobody fully maps anymore. They do not break, so they do not get attention. They are too risky to migrate quickly, so the exit studies stall. And because they are quiet, the licensing rarely gets the scrutiny that a noisier, more visible system would attract.
Adabas and Natural are commonly licensed on mainframe capacity, with the license record capturing the operating system, CPU identifier, LPAR, and the MSU capacity it runs against. That structure creates three recurring pressure points buyers should know before a renewal lands:
| Trap | How it works | Buyer counter |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity drift | The license tracks MSU capacity, so a refresh or LPAR change can lift the basis | Confirm the licensed capacity matches actual need before signing |
| Migration lock in | No credible exit means no alternative at the table | An honest exit cost estimate restores some leverage |
| Quiet uplift | A stable, unmonitored estate accepts annual rises unchallenged | Benchmark the trend and dispute rises with no workload behind them |
None of these require the vendor to act aggressively. They follow naturally from an estate that is critical, embedded, and unmonitored. The buyer side job is to make the quiet estate legible again before the renewal does it for you.
The instinct with a locked in estate is to assume there is no leverage without a migration, and migration is exactly what nobody wants to fund. But leverage does not require actually leaving. It requires a credible, costed understanding of what leaving would take, the discipline to challenge uplifts that have no workload behind them, and a license record reconciled against what is actually deployed rather than what was once installed. A standalone, growth focused owner reads an unprepared buyer quickly, and reads a prepared one just as quickly. The work starts with understanding the estate as it is licensed today: see Software AG mainframe cost optimization and the renewal angle in Adabas renewal negotiation leverage without migration. When a renewal uplift or an audit notice arrives, our mainframe license negotiation work builds the buyer side case for an estate that has gone too quiet to defend itself. For the exit math specifically, see Natural and Adabas modernization license exit math.