If you use a credit/charge card, make an airline reservation, have an insurance claim adjudicated, pay a utility bill, etc.… odds are an old-school COBOL application (with a DB2 database or even more archaic IMS hierarchical system on the backend) is going to process that transaction. Sure, a snazzy web frontend might be in place now, but in the guts is buried business logic reduced and offshored staff no longer possess, and life lingers, only measured in half-life units now…
Most corporate COBOL (as this is the province of Fortune 500 firms) application support and development is handled by offshore vendors, primarily in Asian and Indian locales, with facilities here in the states to hold non-immigrant visa programmers.
COBOL knowledge (and a lot of the details are buried in the platform it runs on — in my experience, mostly IBM mainframes, though I started on Burroughs hardware) is still in a pre-internet age, and college textbooks and three ring bound together 8 1/2 by 11 pages serve as instructional aids, along with experience.
A lot of corporate outlets have engaged in boondoggles to replace the COBOL, but a good deal of these efforts have been epic fail:
* …lot less business knowledge handicaps
* …likely to whiz-bang consultant firms with their own lock-in proprietary systems that woefully underestimate effort to decompose and recompose legacy system…
* …the systems running have been optimized over the years, and they're tied to existing data center operations, which in many cases, are run by IBM. It may seem incredulous today, but even in the 90s, the mainframe systems ran circles around PC and web solutions, especially the "solutions" vendors were offering at the time.
If you use a credit/charge card, make an airline reservation, have an insurance claim adjudicated, pay a utility bill, etc.… odds are an old-school COBOL application (with a DB2 database or even more archaic IMS hierarchical system on the backend) is going to process that transaction. Sure, a snazzy web frontend might be in place now, but in the guts is buried business logic reduced and offshored staff no longer possess, and life lingers, only measured in half-life units now…
Most corporate COBOL (as this is the province of Fortune 500 firms) application support and development is handled by offshore vendors, primarily in Asian and Indian locales, with facilities here in the states to hold non-immigrant visa programmers.
COBOL knowledge (and a lot of the details are buried in the platform it runs on — in my experience, mostly IBM mainframes, though I started on Burroughs hardware) is still in a pre-internet age, and college textbooks and three ring bound together 8 1/2 by 11 pages serve as instructional aids, along with experience.
A lot of corporate outlets have engaged in boondoggles to replace the COBOL, but a good deal of these efforts have been epic fail:
* …lot less business knowledge handicaps
* …likely to whiz-bang consultant firms with their own lock-in proprietary systems that woefully underestimate effort to decompose and recompose legacy system…
* …the systems running have been optimized over the years, and they're tied to existing data center operations, which in many cases, are run by IBM. It may seem incredulous today, but even in the 90s, the mainframe systems ran circles around PC and web solutions, especially the "solutions" vendors were offering at the time.