Cobol is not dead, and reports that it is have been exaggerated, says Mike Gilbert, product director of UK-based Micro Focus, a provider of Cobol development solutions. He was speaking at a breakfast discussion yesterday on the future of the mainframe language.
Gilbert is in the country at the behest of local company MNR Solutions, with which Micro Focus has a strategic partnership. Micro Focus is looking for partners for an early adopter programme that will see core business processes written in Cobol extended to the Web and other distributed platforms.
"We aim to reduce the overall costs and accelerate delivery for all platforms, software architectures and partners," says Gilbert.
"There is something like $5 trillion invested in business systems and in the region of 1.7 million programmers, which means that the wholesale rewriting of the language is neither practical nor affordable."
He says the aim of this early adopter programme will be to develop Cobol into a Web services enabled language, so that programmers can focus on the application`s functionality, rather than the architecture of communicating with other systems.
"It makes sense to keep the present technologies running and integrate them with the newer systems - such as .Net and J2EE - so that we can draw out the best aspects of all the different applications.
"Web services technology will get us back on track towards spending the IT budgets on solving today`s problems, as opposed to building tomorrow`s problem."
Gilbert says he hopes this early adopter programme will provide his company with partners to start building Cobol applications. They will get a head start in these technologies while Micro Focus will get real world experience. "It`s a win-win situation."
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