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Or is the question related to getting rid of the customers existing Micro Focus COBOL and replacing it with a Java or .NET application? Ive found that either could be the case. Taking the first possibility, moving off the mainframe might be a good thing, but why stay with the COBOL?
Youve gotten rid of the mainframe, and maybe saved $1m per year or more. But youve traded one vendor lock-in (your mainframe company) for another (Micro Focus), and you still have to recruit, train, or steal COBOL programmers. Doesnt Micro Focus have monopoly pricing power for COBOL licenses? Theyre not teaching COBOL to most freshman computer science graduates, and those of us that wrote it in the 70s and 80s are more than eligible for retirement.
Worse, you dont have the wide variety of open source software and great development tools to choose from if you stick with COBOL, and its difficult to build highly responsive web applications using what will soon be a 50 year old computer language!
Im often struck, also, by the cost of this kind of Micro Focus COBOL Modernization project. COBOL is COBOL, right? So why does it take years and millions of dollars to move it from one computer to another?
Well, actually there are good reasons, starting with the somewhat mistaken idea that COBOL is COBOL, and moving past the compatibility problems to the performance and security issues. You dont have RACF or DASD channels in your new environment! Modernizing the mainframe COBOL to Java or .NET instead might cost a little more, or it might not. But, instead of just postponing the inevitable moment when the COBOL programmers are just not available, why not modernize once to something you know is going to be here 20 years from now?
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From: (micro focus cobol) http://www.resqsoft.com/micro-focus-cobol-conversion-migration-modernization.html