Heirloom Computing is taking its Enterprise Legay PaaS to the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region with the opening of a new EMEA region division.

Founded by former executives and technology talent of Micro Focus, Heirloom Computing is far from a household name in the cloud computing space, but the company is striving to become a major player in the market. Its focus is on helping enterprises take their plethora of legacy applications and adopting the billions of lines of code for public and private cloud infrastructures.

It's a problem many enterprises are facing, particularly those still working on age-old mainframe code such as that found in COBOL programs (yes, for those who are used to more modern programming languages, COBOL is still alive and well in some of the biggest enterprises in the world). Taking that aging code and adapting it to the reality of the cloud is tricky at best, but Heirloom's goal is to help companies continue to get a bit more life out of that old software.

Heirloom is expanding into the EMEA market under the leadership of Reza Warnink. According to Heirloom COO Kevin Moultrup, the new EMEA head has a track record in the region for building up organizations and is already in the process of developing the company's EMEA headquarters with partners including Accenture (NYSE: ACN), HP (NYSE: HPQ), Sogeti and ECM2.

This is just one of several pieces of news from Heirloom recently. In November, Heirloom partnered with HP to help partners move mainframe workloads to HP Cloud Services. The company has also attracted some notice from the industry, being recognized during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Conference presentation by Dale Vecchio, Gartner Research vice president.

Heirloom has tapped into a growing market that is becoming increasingly important as more enterprises shift from legacy IT infrastructure to the cloud. Over years, they've built their businesses around applications that in some cases are decades old and running on legacy infrastructure, but to keep their businesses operating as smoothly as possible, it's critical to be able to migrate those apps to the new wave of IT infrastructure.