News January 20, 2000

COBOL Experts: Life After Y2K By James E. Gaskin, Inter@ctive Week

Speculation that COBOL programmers would be come rich fixing year-2000 problems and then dis appear en masse proved wrong on both counts. In fact, COBOL programmers may become more valuable to companies now that the Y2K fuss is finished, without muss.

Where will COBOL programmers wind up in the aftermath of Y2K? Like everyone else lately, most will go to the Web.

"There is a big demand for COBOL with e-business integration," says Jim Duggan, vice president and re search director at GartnerGroup (www.gartner.com). The first group of "dot com" companies, such as Amazon. com (www.amazon.com), start ed from scratch, but as traditional companies get into the market  as Barnes & Noble has with its Barnesand noble.com (www.bn.com) online venture  a huge installed base of company applications, mostly written in the COBOL programming language, must connect to the Web storefronts.

"COBOL deals well with business rules," says Joe Nicholson, vice president of marketing for the Act group at leading COBOL tool supplier Merant (www.merant.com). "Companies ex panding into e-business want to leverage their existing business rules, written in COBOL, and use them for middleware."

Nicholson says rewriting COBOL applications for a Y2K fix didn't make sense for most companies. "They get to market faster if they extend" their existing programs, often called "leg acy" systems, to the Web, he says.

There are now tools that let companies use prewritten code and clothe it in Web code. "Companies realized they have lots of legacy programs and are loathe to throw them away. Leg acy wrapping, such as em bedding COBOL programs within Java code, is getting strong support and tools from the major COBOL supporters like IBM, Merant, AcuCOBOL and Computer Associates," Nicholson says.

Since Java is the hot e-business language, shouldn't companies just retrain their COBOL programmers? Not necessarily, Duggan says.

"It takes about nine months to turn a COBOL programmer into a Java programmer," Duggan says. "You have to train three times as many as you need, because the drop-out rate is high, and retrained programmers can move to other companies. Besides, if you have 200 COBOL programmers, how do you maintain your systems for the nine months they are in training?"

"We've seen a tremendous shift over the last year to the career changer," says Gene Longobardi, senior vice president of North American operations at New Horizons Computer Learn ing Centers (www.newhorizons.com), speak ing about certification training organized by Microsoft and Novell. "But we have no formal programs targeting COBOL programmers." New Horizons is the leader in PC training, with 240 locations in 40 countries.

Duggan reports that companies can find COBOL programmers, but not young ones. "Companies can fill $60,000-per-year COBOL jobs, but can't find entry-level people" at an entry-level salary, he says.

The names on COBOL programmers' paychecks may change, however. "Outsourcing by system integrators for COBOL code maintenance may provide a better working environment for programmers" than their current companies, Duggan says. Many programmers may prefer to work for a company specializing in programming rather than one not focused on technology.

But the companies may be well-advised to keep their COBOL programmers, who often have specific business knowledge not duplicated elsewhere in the company.

Testing and quality control are critical to e-business success, especially when outages at major "dot com" companies make headlines, such as those at eBay and E*Trade Securities last year. "As mission-critical ap pli cations are written in Java and C++, companies need to get more systematic in testing and running large production systems," Duggan says. "Mainframe programmers under stand those issues  apply those process skills and maturity," he advises.

The number of lines of COBOL application code ranges from 200 billion to 5 trillion. "COBOL won't go away any time soon," Duggan says. He estimates that out of a group of approximately 2 million COBOL programmers worldwide, 100,000 per year will disappear through natural attrition. "Not many new people are entering that pool."

"COBOL has a place," Nicholson says. "Companies can reduce their time to market by keeping their expertise in-house and reduce their risk by using proven COBOL applications."

"It's one thing to find a Java programmer who can write you a Web page," Duggan says. "It's another to build a system supporting thousands of users that must last for years. Put the legacy mainframe programmers to work on quality and production control issues."

http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/zdy2k/news/0,6158,2424100,00.html?chkpt=entnews-zdy2k

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 26, 2000