Natural: priced on capacity, held in place by decades of business logic.

Natural is Software AG's fourth generation application development language, one of the two products, with the Adabas database, on which Software AG built its business in the 1970s and 1980s. Natural applications are written to run against Adabas, and together they still power large, business critical systems in banking, insurance, and government. The code is typically decades old and embodies business logic that exists nowhere else, which makes a Natural and Adabas estate both indispensable and genuinely hard to leave. Since the start of 2025 the Adabas and Natural business has operated as a standalone unit under Software GmbH, backed by Silver Lake, separate from ARIS and from the webMethods and StreamSets assets sold to IBM in 2024.

Natural on the mainframe is licensed on machine capacity, commonly expressed in MIPS, and enforced through a license key file bound to the CPU or LPAR where Natural runs. The entitlement scales with the rated capacity of the environment rather than with the count of developers or transactions, carried under a term agreement. Because Natural almost always runs against Adabas, the two are commonly licensed and renewed together, so their metrics and terms should be read as one position. Confirm the exact capacity figure and machine binding in your license keys and contract schedules, because that capacity number, not your actual development activity, is what the bill is built on.

Directional, pattern level. Confirm your own metric, capacity, and machine binding against the license keys and schedules before modeling a renewal.

The dominant driver is the licensed capacity, the MIPS of the machines or LPARs where Natural is authorized. Because the price tracks rated capacity, a hardware upgrade or a Natural workload living on an oversized shared partition can inflate the entitlement well beyond what the application genuinely needs. The second driver is the lock in itself: a decades old Natural and Adabas estate with no realistic short term exit gives the vendor real pricing power at renewal, and that leverage shows up as firm uplift behavior on a mature installed base. The third is the contract structure, the term length, uplift clauses, and escalators that compound cost regardless of whether the estate changes at all.

Natural exposure sits in the gap between licensed capacity and the capacity the product can actually reach. Common traps we see at pattern level:

The entitlement is built on capacity and the leverage is the lock in, so the levers work the capacity and the timing. The five that pay:

The credible alternative to Natural is not another language license but modernization: refactoring or replatforming the Natural and Adabas applications onto a different stack, an approach the market has built tooling and services around. That is a real long term option and worth scoping, but it is a multi year program with genuine execution risk, and a half explored modernization story is not leverage a vendor will respect. Until a migration is actually planned and resourced, the reliable wins are aligning licensed capacity to the real footprint, negotiating Natural and Adabas as one position, and validating every audit measurement. A credible modernization roadmap strengthens the renewal; a vague threat does not.