COBOL Migrations

COBOL Migrations

Many of today’s applications that were developed in COBOL are still mission-critical and continue to deliver significant benefits. Nevertheless, the organizations that rely upon them are often faced with increased licensing and maintenance costs, skill shortage, or simply end of support for the technology that served them well for many decades.

Astadia's COBOL transformation solutions provide the opportunity to liberate these valuable and reliable business systems from their dependency on compiler technology and convert them to Object-Oriented languages such as C# or Java, or to another COBOL compiler technology, which also often makes good business sense.

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What You Might Be Facing

Whether on mainframe or off mainframe, companies might face critical challenges with their applications running in COBOL.

1. They soon will be facing a skillsissue. Many COBOL programmers are approaching retirement. Although it is notvery difficult to train people in COBOL, history has shown that young talented programmers and developers are not overly enthusiastic about this prospect.

2. They are locked-in to a non-flexible environment, often subject to a kind of subscription-based payment scheme, and reducing the costs and lock-in has become an objective.

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What Can You Do With Your COBOL?

Off Mainframe Modernization

There are anumber of options available, and the best choice will depend on the concrete as-is situation and the challenges faced:

1. Stay with COBOL, but move out of the current expensive environment and run an affordable COBOL compiler without runtime subscriptions. The applications can even run natively in a containerized environment in a cloud architecture (on prem or public).

2. Transform COBOL in another language all together. This can be Java or C#, and allows you to run the applications natively in a containerized environment in a cloud architecture, on prem or public.

3. Transform COBOL to Java or C# (Option 2), but allow developers to continue to develop and test in COBOL via Astadia’s Visual Studio Project plug-in CobolBridge.

All three options are possible, with plenty of proven successes for companies currently running COBOL applications on mainframe or running COBOL applications off mainframe.

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On Mainframe Modernization

For those that start on mainframe, there is yet another alternative, and that is to move from COBOL to Java on mainframe, with two options even:

4. Transform the COBOL to Java and run on z/Linux

5. Transform the COBOL to Java and stay on z/OS

Organizations taking this approach can also use CobolBridge as a (temporary) solution to allow developers to continue to develop and test in COBOL, while actually compiling Java on mainframe.

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Ready for Your COBOL Modernization Journey?

Choose the migration solution best suited to your platform's capabilities, complexity of data structures, and urgency to transform.  

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Download the COBOL Transformation Options White Paper.

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CodeTurn Transformation

Transform all code allowing your team to start working natively in Java/C# or use another COBOL compiler.

> CodeTurn COBOL to C#

> CodeTurn COBOL to Java

> CodeTurn for COBOL to COBOL

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CobolBridge Transformation

Combine maintaining COBOL code with executing Java/C#, allowing your developers to make the transition to Java/C# gradually over time, for example team by team.

> CobolBridge transformation options

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