October 15, 2018
Got COBOL?
That’s right. … COBOL.
The term COBOL often elicits thoughts of old, outdated technology. After all, it is no longer taught in most colleges and universities, and according to Reuters, COBOL has dropped from being the eighth most popular programming language in 1987 to occupying the 24th spot in 2017. Even more telling is that just over 60-percent of the COBOL developers are older than 45.
Yes, these statistics do show that COBOL is a dying programming language, but there are also statistics that demonstrate COBOL is not dead, … yet.
COBOL is still playing an important role in the technology world, especially in financial transactions. Eighty percent of in-person and 95 percent of ATM transactions use COBOL-based technology. Among the reasons COBOL is still prevalent is because organizations have spent years and large amounts of money to build extensive and trustworthy COBOL-based systems that would be too expensive to replace or the risks of replacement outweigh the benefits of a switch to a new data management system.
In summary, COBOL is still alive and is very much relied upon, but as time marches on, maintaining the status quo will continue to become increasingly difficult. Eventually, the road will end with an organization voluntarily or involuntarily switching to a new way of doing business.
Fortunately, though, FairCom offers a solution — c-treeRTG — that makes the transition or modernization much more efficient and less costly. The “RTG” stands for “Ready-to-Go” and allows an organization to modernize by updating its data management engine underneath without touching the COBOL business logic code. And if an organization wishes to switch to a new system, c-treeRTG solution provides and easier path to do so.
Detailed information about c-treeRTG is available at here.