COBOL is not dead yet… in fact, far from it according to Tim McKenna‘s article which quoted:
“There are more lines of COBOL code in production than all other languages combined”. Is this a question or a fact? Gartner estimates about 180 billion lines of COBOL, mostly written over 40 years ago. Invented in 1959 COBOL has fought off a number of new languages and it is estimated that between 60-80% of worldwide business transactions are made via COBOL programs running on mainframes.
Financial services (both banking and insurance) have used COBOL to process a large number of their transactions for many years and still are to this day.
15 years ago we were told that ‘the end of COBOL is nigh!’ The inherent stability of these mainframes systems and the sheer cost of creating an alternative has kept COBOL very much alive!
However, the ever increasing pressure of Digital Transformation, a decreasing talent pool able to maintain these systems and the rapid Cloud adoption means that we are involved in a number of projects to move away from these legacy environments.
We are close to exhausting our immediate network of Analyst Programmers who bring both ‘new’ and ‘old’ world skills. If you have some experience with either .Net or Java and are happy to brush-up on your COBOL skills then we would love to register your interest and find out whether you are keen on UK, European or North American projects. For more information contact Sanchia on 07484 684679.
