Say goodbye to COBOL

Stuttgart, October 5, 2023 – In the fast-paced technology world, there isn’t room for outdated standards. Or so one might think. COBOL, a programming language that debuted in September 1959, still remains ubiquitous in 2023, used in financial institutions, airlines, retail outlets, and the list goes on. And it is increasingly becoming a problem for users, due to the high costs of mainframe use and a shortage of COBOL experts required for development and maintenance.

GFT and CloudFrame have formed a global partnership to help COBOL users make the transition to more efficient platforms that ensure that users save 15% or more off of their overall annual mainframe bill. CloudFrame’s proprietary technology converts COBOL code into much more efficient and future-proof Java. The cost of a mainframe process is reduced by an average of 50% after the conversion process to Java. GFT brings its expertise in CloudFrame implementation and mainframe modernization to the partnership.

Taking the risk out of a dreaded process

“Partnering with GFT will help our customers achieve application modernization of their COBOL systems,” said Venkat Pillay, founder and CEO of CloudFrame. “The combination of CloudFrame’s Relocate and Renovate COBOL modernization products, along with GFT’s skilled and comprehensive services, will enable customers to transform COBOL into maintainable Java.”

“Even experts are often surprised by how widely COBOL is still being used,” Marika Lulay, CEO of GFT, said. “Migrating legacy applications to a new platform can be a daunting challenge, but it is becoming prohibitively expensive and risky to keep supporting COBOL. With CloudFrame’s conversion solutions and our implementation and mainframe expertise, we take the risk out of a process many IT managers dread.”

Relocate and Renovate

CloudFrame can provide two approaches to the users: Relocate or Renovate. Relocate moves COBOL workloads from the more expensive standard mainframe general-purpose processor (GPP) to lower cost platforms like z integrated information processor (zIIP). Relocate does this by automatically converting COBOL programs into Java and executing them from z/OS UNIX System Services (USS), without any impact on development teams. The benefits are:

• cost reduction
• incremental and fully automated approach
• fast implementation
• low risk (functional equivalence guaranteed)
• SLAs’ performance parity guaranteed
• backward compatibility without disruption in existing environment

With the Renovate model, users can migrate to the cloud, automatically converting their COBOL programs into Java and decoupling application modernization from data migration strategies. The benefits are:

• cost reduction
• incremental
• 5x faster time to market
• fully automated
• high-quality autogenerated code
• configurable template-driven
• automated JUnit test case generation
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