Accenture and SpringSource on Tuesday will unveil a production-ready version of Spring Batch, an open source framework for batch processing.

The framework enables large organizations to use open source software to develop customized batch processing applications, the companies said. Spring Batch already is in use at more than 35 Accenture clients, including Kaufmännische Krankenkasse (KKH), a German health care company, SpringSource and Accenture said.

“This announcement fills a void, as enterprise-caliber open source frameworks for batch processing remain rare," said Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology architect, in a statement released by the two vendors.

Spring Batch builds on the POJO (plain old Java objects) development approach and can help enterprises reduce design and development times by months, according to SpringSource.

Open source frameworks such as Spring Batch offer lower costs for software support and maintenance as well as ongoing participation from a software community, the companies said. The community, meanwhile, benefits from frequent updates and access to the product roadmap and source code. Participants also can contribute through enhancements and software improvements.

Batch processing automates the processing of large numbers of transactions and typically is done at the end of the day or overnight, when computers are less busy. It is used by most large organizations and accounts for billions of transactions daily in applications such as financial accruals claims, payroll, and correspondence, SpringSource and Accenture said.

Spring Batch is downloadable here.

SpringSource is the maintainer of the popular Spring Framework for Java development