Easing Cobol into a Web-shaped world

Integration -- the connecting of applications, and custom-built software in order to support new or existing business processes -- is doable in any number of ways: just take a look through some of the stories in the Integration channel.

This is probably going to be of particular comfort to the large class of companies that still have (whisper it) Cobol at the heart of their operations. Yes, despite the combined best efforts of both the Unix and Microsoft communities these past 20 years, the COmmon Business Oriented Language is still (at least in legacy form) still with us, and even more surprisingly, providing value for many a system yet. And you thought we'd exterminated all this stuff with Y2K.

Joking aside, the vast amount of heritage system functionality in the world means that there has to be a way to leverage it to give new applications connections to the back end. IDC acknowledges this in a December 2003 white paper on various approaches to integration: "Most organisations believe the primary impetus for integration is to be able to adapt to changing business requirements. Thus we've matured from the concept of integration as pulling in information to map from one location to another, to the concept of addressing processes and change via integrated systems. This requires an organisation to think of its integration solution as a flexible entity, and preferably not so tightly coupled to discrete applications. "

This is the environment non-EAI (enterprise application integration) specialists like WRQ and Micro Focus are working in. They say that the secret to integration isn't necessarily to buy a dedicated integration platform: instead, they support techniques like wrapping and componentisation, which allow Cobol system functionality to get reborn into a more open and cross-application oriented world.

Micro Focus is a survivor of a few turns round the track, and now an independent private VC-backed firm of some 400+ employees. UK director of product strategy, Mike Gilbert, says that his customers face two choices in integration: buy a platform from a company like Tibco or Vitria to act as a central hub for all apps, or use his company's products to bridge mainframe software to the new world, an approach he says Gartner sums up as 'programmatic integration'.