Heirloom Computing

Moving Beyond COBOL

Gary Crook, President & CEO

I’ve been involved with COBOL for most of my professional career. It is a language that has many unique characteristics, not all positive. Loved by few and (unfairly) vilified by many, it has persisted because it is extremely good at what it was built for — encapsulating business rules.

Many of you who have experience with the COBOL eco-system will appreciate the quiet reality of the absolute dependence that we all have on it as we proceed through our working day. The rest of you will likely be somewhat perplexed that anyone even uses COBOL today, and no doubt bemused by the bold assertion that your daily life without COBOL would result in unadulterated chaos. Well, despite the many predictions over recent decades of COBOL’s demise, this reality is not going to change anytime soon. That said, it would be remiss of us to not acknowledge the strategic intent of enterprise IT to convert COBOL to Java.

For typically risk-averse enterprise IT organizations, moving beyond COBOL is a tricky proposition. These applications represent the competitive differentiation of the business. They are the operational and transactional backbones of the business. They are the definitive manifestation of “mission-critical”. The thought of rewriting or replacing the high-value trusted business processes embedded in these systems can induce violent shudders of apprehension.

For server-side transaction processing, Java is often (if not already) the strategic platform of choice of enterprise IT – and even in the cloud, many PaaS providers have adopted Java as a supported engine (e.g. Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, Oracle Cloud, Google App Engine, and yes, even Microsoft’s Azure). Our take on why targeting the Java platform makes so much sense for enterprise IT, comes down to 4 key benefits:

1. The ability to deploy and extend applications on an open/strategic platform that is proven and trusted for high-transaction workloads that demand performance, scalability, reliability, security, and manageability.

2. Consolidation of application infrastructure to a single platform. No need to deal with multiple platforms on multiple operating systems.

3. Strategically positions applications for the cloud. Many enterprises have already made a strategic commitment to the Java platform. It’s a smart move — Java has already established itself as the de facto execution engine for the cloud.

4. Improves the productivity and agility of the development organization by modernizing skills, methodology, and process.

Trump, Kushner, COBOL

Gary Crook, President & CEO

Not 3 words you’d immediately assemble together, but that’s exactly what Senior ComputerWorld Editor, Patrick Thibodeau, did yesterday.

His article was prompted by a White House announcement of an “Office of American Innovation” to oversee the modernization of federal IT.

The article then goes on to give Compuware a platform to launch a somewhat bizarre defense of COBOL, as if somehow, wrapping COBOL applications up in DevOps methodologies makes them agile, and consequently, the mainframe can be seen as (according to Chris O’Malley, Compuware’s President/CEO) “… a working environment that looks exactly like Amazon (Web Services)”.

No. It’s not. There’s no amount of makeup that you can apply to my face to make me look like Brad Pitt. Fundamentally, all the required structures for that transformation just do not exist.

There’s much to applaud with Compuware’s mission to modernize and retool the application development lifecycle on the mainframe and impart valuable new skill sets to a workforce that has been largely isolated from considering different approaches to the art of application development. However, beyond that DevOps veneer, you are still working with a language ecosystem on the mainframe. If that’s where you want to be, go for it.

As Shawn McCarthy, an analyst at IDC said later in the article: “… the challenge with older COBOL systems is that many were not designed to be extensible and everything that needs to be done has to rely on custom code”.

And that’s essentially why no matter how much makeup you apply, COBOL systems on the mainframe will never be truly agile. Instead, for as long as they persist, they will continue to be an increasingly burdensome anchor that will slowly but surely impinge on an enterprise’s ability to compete.

Heirloom Immediately Available on the CenturyLink Cloud

Heirloom Computing, Inc. today announced the certification of Heirloom (Platform-as-a-Service) under the CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace Provider Program. Heirloom is a patented software platform that automates the transformation of mission-critical enterprise COBOL/CICS applications to 100 percent Java source and the cloud.

By simply getting started with the CenturyLink Cloud Blueprint, prospective users can easily leverage the value of Heirloom and its rich development toolset called Elastic COBOL (EC) Developer. Within minutes, a Windows-based instance of EC is automatically provisioned and ready for use.

Enterprise CIOs are being challenged to increase business agility, align and consolidate infrastructure to strategic platforms such as Java and the cloud, and significantly reduce the cost of maintaining an inflexible mainframe footprint that costs the industry $70 billion annually.

Today’s Heirloom announcement provides CIOs with a low-cost, low-risk, pay-as-you-use, COBOL-to-Java solution that is readily available on the CenturyLink Cloud platform.

“The ROI of using Heirloom is as immediate as it is profound – Java apps that can run on any Java virtual machine means increased agility combined with significantly lower execution, maintenance and support expenses,” said Gary Crook, CEO, Heirloom. “We’re excited to be working with CenturyLink to meet the needs of enterprises that understand how the cloud can be used to transform legacy IT infrastructure to make their organizations instantly agile and super-competitive.”

“Heirloom is a great example of the workload breadth we’re seeing enterprises considering for migration to cloud,” said David Shacochis, vice president of platform enablement at CenturyLink. “Elastic infrastructure is transformative when applied to mainframe applications – technology like Heirloom EC makes that possible for our customers.”

About Heirloom Computing, Inc.

Heirloom Computing is on a mission to modernize the world’s business-critical enterprise software applications. Heirloom’s best-in-class tools seamlessly migrate legacy systems to private and public cloud computing infrastructures, so IT departments can reap the cost benefits of cloud computing and satisfy user demands for applications accessible via web browsers and mobile devices.

For more information about how Heirloom Computing’s legacy modernization tools can save IT departments time and money, please visit www.heirloomcomputing.com.