“Corporations are sitting on 500 billion lines of COBOL code”

SHIPRA ARORA in conversation with Dr Pamela Coker, CEO, Acucorp

* Is COBOL still alive? How much longer do you give it?

According to the Aberdeen Group, Fortune 500 companies including many banks and insurance majors are sitting on more than 500 billion lines of COBOL code.

Gartner confirms that 50 percent of all business languages are presently in COBOL. Today, more application development and maintenance tools are available for COBOL than for any other programming language.

As of 2000, Gartner research revealed that 70 percent of mission-critical applications were written in COBOL, and that through 2005, approximately 15 percent of all new application functionality will be in COBOL.

Many modern and popular solutions deployed today such as SAP, Peoplesoft and BANCS from FNS (a core banking solution deployed by SBI and Indian Bank) are based on COBOL. It proves that COBOL will be there for a long time; we do not see it going away.

* What advantages does COBOL offer over other modern computing languages that make it better?

COBOL, as you know, stands for Common Business Oriented Language. It was the only standard and structured language created purely for business applications. Businesses are mostly process-oriented structured organisations, and COBOL fits naturally into this space. It is simple, easily readable, and based on industry standards. These are some of the factors that work in favour of COBOL. Besides, COBOL applications are fully debugged—that is, they work. New code typically takes three years to be fully debugged. It adheres to an international standard that industry, academics and governments have agreed to.

* How do you make COBOL relevant for today’s business and technology environment?

COBOL applications will continue to be migrated to newer computers so that they can access or interact with new technologies. Today it is possible to extend COBOL to integrate and communicate with many disparate systems and standards, add a graphical user interface, make a COBOL programme read from or write to an RDBMS, or even integrate with an enterprise portal through a Web services protocol.

I foresee that the COBOL applications currently used by many companies will continue to be used by Web services for a long time. By using Web services, the existing software asset is easily reusable because other applications are available to use the function which the existing COBOL application has. It is important to extend the existing COBOL application so that it can be reused by other systems.

* How will you make a business case for the modernisation of legacy applications based on COBOL versus going for a complete overhaul?

Because of their high business value, COBOL applications will continue to be modernised. One cannot rewrite systems that have been built over two or three decades. Giga consultants point out that corporations which just spent millions to renovate COBOL systems to meet Y2K requirements cannot justify starting a costly application replacement project. Thus, COBOL systems can be expected to run many companies for years to come.

Further, as the COBOL applications are fully debugged, rewriting the application effectively means you are just going to put back all the bugs you worked to remove all these years. CIOs today want a risk-free way of obtaining the benefits of newer technologies without going through long development cycles. COBOL can be quickly and with little risk adapted to work with newer technologies.

* What kind of market opportunity exists in the revival of COBOL?

The opportunity is to componentise systems and integrate them with the new systems. This requires migration, extension and modernisation of COBOL assets.

* l How important is the Indian market vis-à-vis revival of COBOL?

The Indian domestic market does not have a lot of legacy, but a lot of COBOL exists in distributed departmental computerisation. We understand this need and are uniquely positioned to address them. India also offers a huge opportunity in terms of the developer market. If a third of the world’s programmers are in India, then a third of the COBOL modernisation must also be happening here.