Banks … timeline

Banks will “maybe” be done with COBOL… in ten years

Not insulting. Mentions the 800B lines of COBOL code guesstimate. The interesting part is their guess that COBOL specialists can command $100/hour and UP! Important message for those lookking for work.

Finovation Conference

Disappointing. The Modernization talk was the usual empty claptrap. Plus AI. And their book. Nothing helpful, the same the audience has heard for years. And the audience knows it’s all failure-guaranteed.

The Open Source talk talked up Open Source and sold MySQL … needless to say it was an Oracle guy. Much talk about FINOS. A quick review says that there must be a role for us there.

SHARE Reactions

SHARE was the FORTRAN crowd. The Banks, Insurance, business types went to GUIDE, 4x a year. 10K to 15K twice a year for the working sessions. Double that for the “Big Conference”. The attendance all in felt like, max, 5-10K. And felt like over 50$ vendors.

A couple of informative sessions. Mostly I soaked up the zeitgeist which is not healthy nor particularly promising. My net-net: They have four competing Linux/Unix initiatives and it’s not easy for any of them to get to “The Data”.

The big shock: the customers are still running 24-bit addressing. And 31-bit. And 64-bit. But getting to 64-bit “is just too hard” (ASSEMBLER is the goat).