New COBOL Consulting Service offerings ease skills and resource gaps

I am very excited to unveil our new Rocket COBOL Consulting Services, specifically designed to help our customers replatform their COBOL applications efficiently and affordably. Before sharing specifics about these services, I’m hoping to provide some context.

As you know, COBOL has been around for many decades. Used to create some pretty remarkable business solutions, as well as service the more repetitive processes that keep the world functioning, there remains more than 800 billion lines of COBOL code running business applications worldwide. The longevity of these applications is amazing.

I began working on IBM mainframe COBOL systems at about the same time that Micro Focus initiated its first foray into creating off-mainframe COBOL compilers. After 25 years of working on IBM mainframe and SAP implementations myself, I joined Micro Focus. From my first day, I was amazed at how COBOL development, using only Desktop and Laptop devices, could execute a full mainframe solution on my laptop! My wonder is far from over.

Since then, I’ve observed and participated in the evolution of these solutions, many of which were acquired and rebranded by other companies. The acceleration of technology innovation was quite staggering, but also immensely rewarding, as COBOL development and deployment moved onto mainstream platforms and away from isolated, restrictive, and siloed environments.

For more than a decade, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many different customers in several countries and seen for myself the innovation and skills poured into these business applications that deliver and support capabilities ranging from car manufacturing to financial services.

At Rocket Software, our objective is to help customers continue to use these applications, without the risk of process change or the burden of moving data into a completely new package, only to be faced with poor performance and a lack of functionality. We achieve this all while avoiding costs associated with rewrite, re-test, and re-train. Like I said, remarkable.

It’s important to note, however, that to accomplish this, we evolved our products in several ways to ensure:

• Applications can run on current third-party platform releases for operation and data.
• Best practices in application development can be applied to COBOL, as they are with .NET, Java or other languages.
• That customers can embrace the biggest driving force today, the ability to transition easily to a cloud platform, whether private or public.

During our internal development journey at Rocket, we have enhanced our tooling to ensure not only that existing COBOL applications run in these environments, but also that our customers can easily adopt modern development practices. In this way, we ensure that DevOps, automation, unit testing, cloud native as well as many other features are all available to our COBOL communities.

Of course, all this change can be daunting. We really do not want to overwhelm customers with too much change at once. In fact, we see transition steps as a journey, to be taken at a manageable pace and we recognize that this pace will differ from customer to customer. Further, we understand that there will be tasks that customers simply do not have the development capacity to tackle alone; in these situations, potential benefits are pushed out for years and may never be realized.

That’s why today, we are introducing a set of packaged services that will help customers progress through their respective journeys— whatever their target destination. Our goal is to apply these same skills that write the market-leading COBOL compilers and tools to help customers realize their objectives faster. Whether that is to understand what they have installed, to complete an upgrade, to migrate to a new operating system, adopt DevOps, modernize the application, or even help to move to cloud—we can provide the services to meet the goal. We believe that by offering access to our expertise and time, we can, together, bridge the gaps between the application’s potential and the delivery of new services to your end users and customers.

I am quite passionate about the solutions and capabilities we can deliver with our products. I recognize, however, that it is often challenging for customers to reap the full benefits of their COBOL applications. I’m hopeful that with these new services, we can work together and extract many more years of value and productivity from your COBOL investments.

To learn more about COBOL Consulting Services, please contact your account executive or contact us here.