Cobol lives on

Micro Focus CEO notes continued prominence of legacy programming language

Kelly: I think the reality is, it’s kind of more complex than that, because you find a lot of Web developers and a lot of Java developers tend to be cross-language-capable. So, if you’re a Java or C# developer, to actually do or become productive in Cobol, they probably only take two or three weeks in reality. It’s not a binary choice to ask, is it Cobol or is Java? And even what I’ve found going around some big financial services companies in the U.S. and Europe and public sector, there’s a lot of pressure from CIOs to say -- we’ve got so many Cobol developers and we’ve got a lot of Cobol applications and investment, and what we’re seeking to do is get more value out of that. Definitely 10 years ago, if you’d ask all the CIOs around the world they would have said -- we’re going to switch Cobol off within the next five years. And we sit here today and there’s still over 1 million Cobol developers out there. And it’s still running 70 percent of the transaction systems around the [world] … If you’re going to talk to CIOs, they’re way more pragmatic about a heterogeneous language, but they’re much more concerned that they want to take their enterprises towards modernization but also they’re much more animated around architectures like SOA … [Lately], there’s not a lot of pressure to do rewrites from Cobol. There used to be. Certainly when we were coming out of Y2K, there was definitely a perception five, six years ago that the world would be completely object-oriented by now. I guess it would be all things like Java, it would all be things more recently around things like AJAX and XML. That's just not materialized. And the reality is that most core business systems are still written in Cobol.

IW: I have not ever attempted to write Java or some of the newer .Net languages. I did take Cobol once back in the days when you had the punch cards, and I thought it was pretty straightforward. I didn’t think it was all that complex to do Cobol.

Kelly: I think it’s relatively easy, English language-based, and it’s very logical in terms of its structure. And I think you’re right. Yes, I learned back in punch card days, and I did Cobol, Fortran, and Basic. It was easier than anything else, but certainly the programmers that we’ve got -- we’ve got about 200 engineers, and they’ve all typically been doing Java, C++ and Cobol -- and they will all say that Cobol is as easy as any other language and it’s pretty easy to pick up.

IW: There are no punch cards anymore, are there?

Kelly: I haven’t seen any for a while. I came from a world where we had to send punch cards and then get the results back two or three days later. And I think things are a bit more immediate now. And I think the other thing, kind of the nice thing about what the CIOs are asking, is they’re asking architectural questions around SOA, .Net. What we offer is a bit of the best of both worlds. We offer robust applications that have been around for a while, but we can put them into these contemporary architectures like .Net. So you can have very modern-looking applications, browser-based, where the core engine runs in Cobol. And it’s the case [where] there’s a lot of what we call independent software vendors out there, like Lawson and even people like Oracle, that embed our language within their application packages.

IW: I’m looking at information on some of your products, the Micro Focus Studio line. Can you talk about your application modernization and migration strategy?