This is fine, he says -- as far as it goes. "It's low risk and cost, but you can run into problems with the security and scalability of the bridging technology. There can be a particular snag if the integration element happens to be associated with a lot of transactions." Many customers, he says, are now looking at migration of the older application, or at least parts of it, to a new platform.
But don't think simple downsizing. That was a huge trend in the 1990s, when companies started baulking in large numbers at the, well, large numbers in dollars they were being charged for mainframe cycles. A lot of apps did get moved, more often rewritten, onto midrange boxes, but at the time PCs just weren't able to take the load of the chunkier pieces of system up at the host level.
Micro Focus customers are solving their integration issues by just this step now, though. International publishing giant Bertelsmann runs an internal IT department it calls the ICS Competence Centre in Vienna. It migrated a raft of existing Cobol apps off its mainframes on to PC servers, a move its CIO Guenther Boedner claims is saving the company around 50,000 euros a month.
The app in question manages central business processes and customer records for some 3.5 million Bertelsmann book club customers of book clubs in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, French-speaking Canada and Poland. It runs to one million lines of Cobol, and was finished a mere 20 years ago. "We expect to achieve an outstanding ROI," he says, and sees integration of these refreshed systems with other applications as "the next step, much easier for us to do now than with any Big Bang approach".
WRQ is a Seattle-headquartered US software outfit active since 1981, whose European HQ is in the Netherlands, and which claims BT, AT&T and Freightliner as customers. Its director of integration strategy, Ron Grevink, explains its approach to integration: "The business cycle has decreased in such a dramatic fashion -- from two or three years to more like six months today -- that IT infrastructure hasn't kept pace. We think Web services is going to be the answer, the silver bullet, but at least so far we have more hype than substance there. We need other technologies to solve the integration problem while we're on the way to the service-oriented future."
Talkback
After seeing the huge amount of Java Junk that's accumulating out there, I'm not so inclined to be snotty about COBOL any more.
COBOL code has stayed around because it's possible to write reasonably good code without a genius IQ (read: COBOL programmers are cheap). Frankly, Java claims the same, but with less satisfactory results. Since COBOL is now OO and has HTTP extensions (amongst other goodies), what say we throw Java back where it came from and use COBOL as the lingua franca of business coding instead?
It's not really about the technology so much as who's behind the technology and pushing it forward. MSoft is big and pushing their .NET solutions, so as long as they keep doing that, it will have a presence and continue to evolve.
IBM, Oracle, Sun, and other heavy hitters are pushing Java, so it's going to continue to be adopted and continue to evolve too.
The new COBOL and all of the extensions may be the greatest thing ever, but without an 800-pound corporate gorilla to champion it, market it, and generally beat the drum, it simply won't fly.
Plus, you may want to think about if the new plugins are really innovations, or is it just COBOL playing catch-up. It's one thing to bolt on OO and HTTP/socket awareness to a language, but that doesn't make it immediately desirable to use.