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.
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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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.
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.
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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