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The Ghost Lives On

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Peoplesoft and SAP might be the greatest of business rivals, but they do have

one thing in common, apart from both being ERPs. The answer is COBOL-the

preferred business programming knowledge of yesteryears, long believed to be

dead and buried well under the onslaught of the C++ and C#s. And both also share

that commonality with the Indian Railways and State Bank of India. Trivia worth

featuring in Kaun Benega Crorepati? While Peoplesoft is front-ended by Delphi

with COBOL sitting on the back-end, the SAP code is written using ABAP, a German

variant of COBOL. Even the entire code of Indian Railways is written in COBOL.

FNS, the core banking application of SBI has also been developed using COBOL.

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Notwithstanding the claims of C and its various recent variants, the fact is

200 billion lines of codes are still in COBOL across different business

applications all over the world. More than $1.5 trillion has been invested in

COBOL applications worldwide, and more than 30 billion COBOL transactions occur

each day. That, incidentally, exceeds the total number of Web page hits on any

given day.

Seems like all those epitaphs for COBOL were grossly premature. Says Pamela

Coker, president & CEO, Acucorp, a company specializing in business

applications on COBOL, "Despite all the claims about the death of COBOL,

there is "something" in the language that's not letting it

RIP."

Brownie Points



This "something" is where COBOL actually derives its strengths.

That in turn might explain its longevity, despite all doomsday predictions. For

one, COBOL is the ideal language for business applications, because it has

strong business logic embedded in it. Besides, its verbosity makes it more

readable than all the newer languages. And with most of the interactive source

code in COBOL being already debugged, most business applications are now loathe

to replace COBOL with C or Java.

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COBOL

Nuggets
75%

of total production transactions on mainframes done using COBOL
Cobol mainframes

process more than 83% of all

transactions worldwide
Over 95%

of finance—insurance data is processed with COBOL

Lastly, COBOL is very useful for all transactional processing applications,

which explains why it is still the preferred development language for payroll

systems, inventory or insurance related applications that require large amount

of transactions. Though Coker admits that no new lines of COBOL codes are being

written now, the language is still thriving and will continue to do so, since

all new applications are written on top of the business applications developed

only on COBOL.

According to Coker, historically, COBOL has been popular with business

because of its portability, maintainability, interoperability and the fact that

it has been part of a standard process for 40 years. These are qualities that

today's businesses may require more than ever, given the increasing drift

towards open systems and non-proprietary solutions. The fact that old code can

easily be brought forward into the newer standards is one of COBOL's biggest

assets.

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Says RN Raja, managing director, Insight Computech, Acucorp's partner in

India, "Rewriting the same applications over and over is not cost-effective

when you can easily re-host existing code and adapt it to meet your needs. If

there is a huge backlog of Cobol, re-hosting with interoperability makes perfect

business sense." Solutions from vendors like AcuCorp or MicroFocus, now

re-christened Merant, who have been strong evangelists of COBOL, enable

interoperability between COBOL and newer computing languages like XML, .NET,

J2EE, and Visual Basic.

Advantage India



India definitely has a large chunk of these 200 billion lines of codes in

COBOL. And, while during the pre Y2K hype Indian COBOL programmers were

engrossed in re-writing applications for outsourced projects, there were no

significant changes within Indian enterprises. Other than the Indian Railways

and SBI, behemoths like the RBI, the oil majors, PSUs, besides several large and

small co-operative banks in Karnataka and Maharshtra have made massive

investments in COBOL.

What's

on the COBOL Menu?

Vendor

Offerings
Acucorp AcuCobol-GT,

a COBOL compiler; extended family of solutions, portable to more

than 600 platforms, allowing Cobol applications to be deployed over

the Internet
Fujitsu

Software Corporation
NetCobol,

a COBOL development environment and suite of tools to build fast,

business systems on open platforms, including Microsoft's .NET

Framework
MicroFocus

(or Merant)
Net

Express, which combines an object-oriented COBOL development

environment with XML extensions and Web services interface

construction tools
LegacyJ PERCobol,

the new integrated development environment (IDE) now based on the

IBM Eclipse technology, including COBOL program templates,

incremental compile, integrated Language Sensitive Editing and

graphical debugging
Liant

Software
RM/COBOL,

one of the most widely used COBOL application development systems in

the world
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Adds Raja, "Some of the largest transaction systems in the country are

written in COBOL, as it is lightweight and is not resource-hungry. Indian oil

companies have millions of lines of code written in COBOL. A new system after

total overhaul could end up costing these companies eight to ten times more

developing new applications that would seamlessly talk to the existing COBOL

applications." Vendors like Acucorp, Merant or Fujitsu are engaged in doing

exactly this. Some of Acucorp's significant successes in India have been with

ANZ.IT, Bank of India or Canara Bank. Merant's big success has been with FNS

in SBI and the Ramada Chain of hotels.

In the ultimate analysis, Coker believes from a strategic business

perspective, COBOL is still a winner. It solves real business problems while

offering all of the advantages of the new technologies. However, if migration is

preferred, the first step can still be to start with interoperation. COBOL

modules embody critical business logic that can be preserved and can continue to

function. The biggest challenge will be to extract and document the business

rules. COBOL code can be modularized and exposed to the outside world at a pace

that suits specific business requirements. Many languages can communicate with

each other, COBOL included, as long as they adhere to standard communication

protocols.

Rajneesh De in Mumbai

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