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COBOLHere’s to the next 60 years

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COBOL – Here’s to the next 60 years

Date: Thursday 7th November

Location: Becketts, 1pm

Speaker: Derek Britton, Product Director, Application Modernization and Connectivity, Micro Focus

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COBOL

… why do we still care?

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… because not everyone thought it was a good idea

It is rather unlikely that Cobol [sic] will be around by the end of the decade.

– Anonymous, June 1960

Digital transformation is changing everything…

84%of CEOs expect

digital to increase profit margin

80%Of IT decision

makers say sourcing flexibility and hybrid

IT is a business critical element

46%of product value will

be digital by 2020

50%of CEOs say their industry will be

digitally transformed by

2020

And today’s Enterprise is Hybrid… and Highly Valued

Internetof

Things(IoT)

z / OSPL / I

COBOL

CICS

IMS

PublicCloud Private

Cloud

CORBA

IaaS

PaaS

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… and the value must be protected

“…a shift from a rip and replace approach towards modernization” - IDC

85% 90% 55%

Core apps remain strategic

- Micro Focus

Of apps will still be in use in 5 yrs

- Gartner

Will modernize within 2 yrs

- Micro Focus

Gartner recommends executing continuous business-driven modernization to provide optimum value - Gartner

IDC is seeing “modernization strategies that are aimed at gaining significant business value in the form of agility, new business capabilities, and a reduction in TCO and risk” - IDC

Protect and Grow The Value…

COBOL: Relentlessly Popular

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• Top 30 since records began

• Resurgent since 2011

How has COBOL stood the test of time?

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Business-Centricity

Portability

Readability

1. Better By Design

Business-Centricity

Common Business Oriented Language

Better By Design

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Putting the B in COBOLNumeric arithmetic accuracy – always right, all the time

• COBOL delivers arithmetic accuracy to 38 digits

Strong data manipulation – protect data integrity

• Faster data access than any RDBMS, and support of data files of a variety of formats (RDBMS, Indexed, Sequential, Relative)

• Data manipulation and reporting built in to the language with the SORT capability. Performance – execute at the speed of business

Performance

• For computational speed and batch support, COBOL applications can be optimized for specific hardware and platforms, increasing performance and throughput

Portability

“The language should be … machine-independent.”

Better By Design

IBM Z/OSRedHat

Data General

OS/2

Texas InstrumentsSCO UNIX SVR4

Intel Solaris

Silicon Graphics

TEC

Sparc SolarisMatsushita

Siemens SNI

HP/UX AWS

UbuntuMS DOS

.NETToshiba

Hitachi

FujitsuNEC PA-RISC

AzureBull GCOS

Linux on Z

Canon

SequentDEC Alpha Tru64

Amdahl

JVMSUSEAS/400

AIX

Windows 10OSF/1

WinNT

COBOL Where? … the answer is yes

NT on AlphaMitsubishi

Windows 3.1

ICL VME

SCO UNIXWAREPFU

Win95

OmronAT&T

olivetti

Compaq

Panasonic

Readability

“It should use simple English or pseudo-English and avoid symbolism as far as possible.”

Better By Design

DISPLAY

MOVE

ADD

MULTIPLY

PERFORM … UNTIL

IF… THEN

Etc.

Readability

• English-like verbs

• Strongly typed

• (Usually) Structured layout

Readability

• “COBOL is one of the few languages written in the last 50 years that’s readable and understandable.”

• “It’s not just a write-only language, you can come back years later and understand the code.”

• “If you can work with Eclipse, Java, Visual Studio and C# you can master COBOL in a matter of hours.”

• “Any developer worth their salt in any other language anywhere could learn enough COBOL in a week to maintain code.”

Adaptability

“the language must be open-ended and capable of accepting change and amendment”

2. Better Over Time

Adaptability: Decades of innovation and evolutionYou name it, COBOL does it.

Data

• IMS, VSAM, DB2, IDMS, Datcom

• Oracle, SQLServer, PostgreSQL

Languages

• C, C++, Java, C#, PL/I, PL/SQL

OSs

• z/OS

• Linux, AIX, OS/400

• Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, Unixware

Managed Envts

• .NET

• JVM

Virtual Envts

• AWS, Azure.

• VMWare, Docker, Kubernetes

New Constructs

• Micro Services

• OO

• API

• SOA, Web Services

Adaptability

Built to last: COBOL’s secret ingredients

Resources

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Download from: http://www.pages02.net/ibm/IBMSystemsMag/NativeMicroFocus2eBookForm

IBM Systems Magazine, July 2019

White Paper – “A Living Legend”

• Full review of COBOL’s uniqueness and contemporary capabilities

• Extensive 3rd party commentary

• White Papers

• Press Release

• Press Articles

• Webinar

• Podcast

Find Out Morewww.microfocus.com/cobol60

WHEN AGE OF COBOL = 60

CONTINUE

Of course, COBOL knew all along…

With millions of global transactions processed every second, COBOL delivers adaptability and performance, outpacing its rivals. A language that’s quietly powered six decades of economic growth and a technology with a very bright future ahead.

– Tom Ross, IBM

With over 200 billion lines of code in use by large organizations, COBOL plays an important role in the digitization of core business systems. 60 years on, modern COBOL delivers even greater possibilities supporting the digital age.

– Bob Ellsworth, Strategic Workloads, Microsoft

We have found that COBOL’s strengths are its portability, applicability and a very natural language-like structure. Its ease of programming… is second to none and can allow novice programmers to dive right in. I believe COBOL’s longevity will be assured ... here’s to the next 60 years!

– Vanessa White, Product Owner, Advanced

COBOL is still quietly running the world’s most critical business applications. COBOL is by far the best language for business. It will remain strategic and maintain its reputation of being a fast, robust and future-proof programming language

– Roland Koo, Program Director, Enterprise Products and Compilers on Z, IBM

I first learned to program in 1970, almost 50 years ago. At that time, COBOL was the new kid on the block. Now 60 years old, COBOL has not only stood the test of time but is still going strong.– Laurie Wallmark, Author of Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code

COBOL has allowed us to re-use our existing code base and modernize it … move to the Cloud and take advantage of improved IDE as well as Agile and DevOps practices. COBOL and application modernization are a fundamental part of our company’s future

– Russell Hollick, Chief Software Architect, SYSPRO Corporate

COBOL is 60 years young. The language that powers the mainframes that run the world is as relevant today as it was in the 1960's. With new digital pressures, the mainframe and COBOL are back at the forefront for the developer enabling innovation and transformation

– Steven Dickens, IBM LinuxOne

We have decades of COBOL experience within our company and with new tools, we can now leverage a modern IDE, where developers can work with COBOL and Java, together. Mixed language debugging helps us deliver better software. COBOL is an important element of our future business strategy

– Sven Oldenburg, CTO, DIE Software

It is rather unlikely that Cobol [sic] will be around by the end of the decade.

– Anonymous, June 1960

COBOL at 60 www.microfocus.com/cobol60

Twitter: @derekbrittonuk #cobol60