The COBOL Crisis California's Controller said it would take six months or more
to reprogram their COBOL-based payroll system to issue minimum-wage checks to state workers. Replacing a massive
system like California's is expensive, but keeping a dying system on life support can be catastrophic.
Tech Republic August 2008
The need for softwaremining is driven by the imminent COBOL Crisis. The majority of Fortune 500 companies have legacy systems written in COBOL, mostly on mainframe computers, which was the programming language of choice from the 1960s to the late 1980s. IDC (International Data Corporation) estimate that there are more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence today and Gartner suggest that 85% of this code requires migration. COBOL is not going away soon, in fact more is created each year – possibly up to 4 billion lines – but enterprises need to enable the use of more flexible technologies where they can employ people to maintain the programs.
The age distribution for mainframe workers is quite different than the distribution for workers
in more recent IS environments such as UNIX and Windows. According to studies done by the
Meta Group (now part of Gartner), 60% of the people in mainframe environments are 50 and
older compared to only 8% for UNIX and Windows employees. At the other end of the age spectrum,
22% of Unix/Windows trained IT workers are under 30 compared to only 5% for mainframe workers.
So while COBOL may not be disappearing, the people who understand it are and moreover the business
rules encapsulated in this legacy code can only be understood by reading the code.
This creates a massive issue for enterprises which they will need to address
urgently – the dependency on COBOL could be fatal.
The softwaremining technology transforms legacy program code to modern programming
environments using unique software which enables the analysis of business rules buried in
legacy COBOL and the generation of scalable modern program code. This enables the deployment of
mission critical systems across lower cost and more adaptable systems platforms without requiring
wholesale organisational disruption.
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