Amazon Alexa Hooks Up With COBOL/CICS (On The Cloud)
August 9th, 2017Gary Crook, President & CEO
There’s a lot of chatter about how to make mainframe workloads agile. I have contributed to that chatter myself. The discourse is essential. Boiled down, my assertion is that the mainframe ecosystem is foundationally not agile (and never will be). No amount of DevOps tooling or vendor misdirection is going to change that.
In my last article, I made the following statement:
Mainframe workloads are an essential part of any digital transformation strategy, but those workloads will persist in a different form. One that protects existing function, but also one that is seamlessly integrated with an agile ecosystem.
Below is a (3-minute) video that implements the above statement. It was put together inside 2 hours by Heirloom Computing’s VP of Engineering, Ian White.
This was a mainframe application that was compiled (unchanged) to Java and executed on the cloud using Heirloom, which automatically makes the workload instantly agile (all transactions are immediately accessible as a service). Agile enough for Ian to very quickly hook it up to Alexa.