SA faces mainframe crisis

Johannesburg, 12 Mar 2007

Many large business and financial organisations still run major and mission-critical applications on mainframes, but lack the skills to make them accessible via the Web, warns Compuware.

"The challenge for companies making these modifications is that they are losing staff with mainframe skills to retirement," says Adrian Risi, regional technical specialist for Compuware Southern Africa.

According to Gartner, the average age of Cobol programmers around the world is 53, say Risi. The problem, he explains, is that most of these programmers are retiring without passing on their deeper knowledge of company-specific Cobol systems to new developers.

"Companies need to ensure this knowledge is passed on to younger developers so that the core business functionality can be maintained and altered in future," says Risi.

Underlining the importance of continuity in skills, Risi says mainframes are likely to remain a vital part of companies' IT infrastructure for some time because of the ability to deliver the highest quality of service at the lowest cost per transaction.

For this reason, Risi predicts that the business information of many large companies will continue to reside on mainframes and that the importance of mainframes will grow rather than diminish as organisations continue to consolidate their server and storage environments.