[email protected] (Greg Shirey) writes: > For these mainframe-centric businesses, the Cobol application suite > that runs the heart of the business isn't going anywhere. "But they > still need to deal with the declining Cobol workforce . . . to keep > these systems viable for the next decade or two," says Dale Vecchio, > research vice president at Gartner Inc. > > As for the other 90% of businesses running mainframes today, Vecchio > thinks the Cobol brain drain will be the catalyst for more extensive > migrations off the platform, through rewrites, moves to packaged > applications or recompiling and re-hosting Cobol on distributed > computing platforms. After years of foot dragging, the looming Cobol > brain drain will force many organizations into making a decision -- > one way or the other -- within the next three to five > years. "Increasingly, I see this transition happening," Vecchio > says. "Waiting isn't going to make this any cheaper, and it isn't > going to reduce the risk."
there was enormous migration off mainframes in late 80s and early 90s that resulted in predicting mainframe use would disappear altogether. there was some very high value overnight batch cobol that had enormous amount of institutional knowledge that had grown up over a period of decades and wasn't easy to understand and/or translate to other environments. during the 90s there were billions spent on failed efforts to translate some of these applications to other environments. Since then there has been somewhat hiatus ... for many of these, the cost of not having functional operational environment was enormously larger than the significant cost differential between mainframes and other technologies. however, there has been slow erosion, with some becoming obsolete and/or the cost of adapting to changing environment exceeds starting over from scratch. In some cases, the decades of institutional knowledge becoming less and less applicable is walled off with minimum change and new innovation and adaptation occuring elsewhere. as I've mentioned before in the late 80s, a senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at annual, worldwide, internal communication group conference ... supposedly on 3174 performance, but opened the talk with the statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. The communcation group had strangelhold on mainframe datacenters with its strategic ownership of everything that crossed the datacenter walls ... was attempting to preserve its dumb terminal paradigm and fiercely fighting off client/server and distributed computing. The disk division was starting to see data fleeing datacenters to more distributed computing friendly platforms with drop in disk sales. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
