With more than 95% of all financial and insurance data being processed by Cobol, this third-generation language is here to stay, according to Mike Bergen, Gauteng regional manager of Migration Ware.
Normally, not much in IT has staying power and what`s here today is gone tomorrow, Bergen says. "The ICT landscape now changes significantly on almost a yearly basis, except for one notable stalwart, which has been around for almost 50 years - the programming language called Cobol."
While the mainframe environment does not have the attraction of .Net or Java, the reality is that behind the scenes, Cobol continues to be the most important programming language in the world today, he states.
Cobol applications account for 60% of all the applications that are in operation, and around 85% of all the transactions (globally) that are processed, according to the Database and Network Journal, Bergen notes.
The Aberdeen Group estimates that $2 trillion has been invested in mainframe applications in corporations that house about 70% of all critical business logic and data. Gartner says Cobol code accounts for 65% (200 billion lines of code) of the total software in use, according to Bergen.
At the Cobol Future 2007 event in Rotterdam earlier this year, he says, it was stated that more than 60% of all company information accessible through the Internet is stored on mainframes. Eighty-three percent of all transactions and 95% of all financial and insurance data are processed by Cobol mainframes.
Bergen cites the reason for Cobol still being the first choice of financial institutions, as mission-critical high throughput systems require proven technology, predictability, reliability, scalability, high performance and ease of integration to function optimally. And that is exactly what Cobol provides, he concludes.
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