Application Modernization and COBOL

There is growing pressure on firms to “Modernize” their technology. There are many aspects:

For years now the Technology Industry has identified “The Cloud” in all of its various deployment options to be the gold standard. Most executive teams want to adopt the Cloud technologies to achieve flexibility and cost savings. These are import objectives.

So Modernization Program Design is largely a matter of finding ways to moving production applications to The Cloud and directing all new development to be Cloud-enabled.

COBOL should not be considered a roadblock. Or even a speedbump. GCC COBOL and GnuCOBOL support those objectives and may offer paths forward that save costs and lower risk.

COBOL Applications and The Cloud

COBOLworx’s two COBOL compilers produce programs that run on the operating systems and APIs native to The Cloud. Furthermore, COBOL programs generally have no external dependencies as the COBOL language is relatively complete for business application programming. That means that only a small COBOL-library module and the binary programs produced by GCC COBOL or GnuCOBOL are needed.

Furthermore, both COBOLworx compilers fit perfectly into modern Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) techologies like Kubernetes, Ansible, Jenkins, etc. That means your developers can take advantage of state of the art programming, testing, and deployment practices.

COBOL Skills Shortages

Unless the modernization program includes modifications to the COBOL program logic, few actual COBOL skills are required to “port” source programs to these new compilers. Many of the incompatibilities can be mechanically fixed without in-depth COBOL knowledge. An experience programmer familiar with languages like Python, Go, Java, etc. can become proficient at fixing incompatibilities in a week or so.

IBM Mainframe users have inventories of very old COBOL, some of which may still be burdened with ASSEMBLER (machine-language) subroutines or utility programs that are difficult to rewrite. Some of those programs may be running years after the actual source code was lost. And most of the inventory over forty years old has likely not been recompiled for years. Much of the inventory may recompile with only mechanical problems but those troubling modules may require expert help.