“Not only do they want to reduce operating costs, they need to increase agility to meet market demands, deliver future-ready technologies, adopt cloud and modern development practices, and drive IT innovation to support the business.” “Lift-and-shift was a popular strategy a decade ago, but it is typical for organizations today to want more value from a modernization project,” Jones said. This often requires using an emulator on the target platform to enable the application to continue to run as before.īut lift-and-shift may not provide the long-term value many organizations seek. But all those routes are fraught with risk.īy lift-and-shift, we typically mean a straight copy of an application from a legacy platform to a more modern one, without making any changes to the design of the application.
Micro focus cobol software#
You could try and find a similar piece of software off the shelf conduct a straight lift-and-shift of the application onto cheaper infrastructure, or commit to a wholesale application rewrite into a modern language like Java or C#.
Micro focus cobol free#
“This might be due to a resource shortage caused by demographic effects or changes in customer expectations in terms of timely availability of data.”įor workloads where that business case has been successfully made, there are several ways to free yourself of those legacy constraints. “As long as those workloads reside on the mainframe, there must be a business case to move away from Cobol,” said Markus Zahn, cluster lead for new mainframes at Commerzbank. If you are going through a digital transformation, you will eventually have to deal with the elephant in the room of that big mainframe in the corner that is hosting 70% of your business applications.” When you are thinking about your competitive edge, if you are on mainframe, you will fall behind. “Modern, mobile, and cloud systems integrating into mainframe is really difficult. “It’s not just a Cobol skills issue, it’s a broader legacy modernization issue, of which Cobol is just one element,” Jones said.
Micro focus cobol drivers#
Jones sees the dual mainframe and Cobol skills crises, associated cost considerations, and the need to maintain competitive advantage via technology innovations as the major drivers behind organizations moving on from Cobol today, especially those applications that still reside on a mainframe. is functionally rich but it happens to run on a platform that is restrictive and doesn’t play with other modern systems,” said Tim Jones, managing director of application modernization at software service provider Advanced. “These are 20- to 30-year-old apps that have served the business well, but they accumulate technical debt and are very specific to what that business has. Cobol does the job, but it’s hard to maintain and integrate
That’s because, even at the ripe old age of 61, Cobol is still being used by many big banks, insurance companies, and public organizations to run core transactional business processes, like paying unemployment benefits or dispersing money from an ATM. The importance, and brittleness, of these systems was on show back in April 2020, when, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, various state authorities from New Jersey to Kansas started to put out desperate pleas for Cobol programmers to volunteer or come out of retirement to keep their creaking unemployment systems running in the face of unprecedented demand. For many organizations, that age shows, and people who can keep mainframe-based Cobol applications upright are becoming harder and harder to find, especially as most computer science programs aren’t teaching it any more. The programming language Cobol has been around for 61 years in some form or another.
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