Cobol is ticking, but how long?

<div class="section0"><div class="Normal"><span style="" font-size:="">BANGALORE: Is old tech warrior, Cobol or common business oriented language, dead or lost in the Web? The aging Cobol, the yesteryear''s dominant programming language, may be a ''thing'' of past for today''s techies, but it is still alive and serving its customers from the back-end of many corporate networks.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">For survival, it is making itself compatible with the new age favourites like .NET, Java and XML. As per estimates, around 10,000 engineers in India are engaged in Cobol-related projects. Cobol, which many say, is on the extinct, is still fetching revenues for IT companies in forms of maintenance and support. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Says Reji George, practice head at Wipro Technologies, ''''In case of some large customers, the back-end or core apps like HR, finance are still on Cobol. While these companies are now upgrading to Web technologies, 10-25% of the IT infrastructure is still on Cobol.'''' </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Interestingly, there are several companies like Acucorp, Micro Focus and Liant whose fortunes completely depend on Cobol. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Cobol products are also available from other companies like Realia from CA, Fujitsu Cobol from Fujitsu and Visual Age Cobol from IBM.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Says Pamela Coker, President & CEO, Acucorp Inc, ''''Cobol was designed purely for business applications just as much as FORTRAN was a Formula Translator that still dominates scientific applications. Today, Java is expert in design user interface, but Cobol provides powerful business logic.''''</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Meanwhile, companies like Acucorp try to make Cobol relevant by marrying Cobol with new technology, like .NET, J2EE and XML in core business applications. While banking, insurance, transportation, salary packages, accounting and manufacturing applications are written in Cobol. Many of Peoplesoft''s applications are in Cobol.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Giga consultants note that corporations that just spent millions to renovate Cobol systems to meet year 2000 requirements cannot justify starting a costly application replacement project, at least for the next few years. FNS, the application implemented at SBI (provided by TCS) is in Cobol. But, will Cobol be there for the long haul?</span></div> </div>