The COBOL Working Group, which launched in 2020 as a response to the increasing interest in COBOL and the misinformation of it, aims to promote and support the continued use of the COBOL language globally. One of its first missions is to identify the COBOL market, challenges, concerns and how companies are addressing these issues.
Thorough research, the working group uncovered that COBOL is a proven staple with hundreds of billions of lines of production code used across many industries. This year, the COBOL Working Group is ready to get more details on a more global scale.
Today at the Open Mainframe Summit, Open Mainframe Project announced a new COBOL research study in collaboration with the COBOL Working Group, the Linux Foundation Research and the Linux Foundation Training and Certification. This project seeks to achieve a detailed understanding of the extent to which vendor investments in COBOL have continued, enabling COBOL to significantly increase its interoperability with development environments like Java and .NET, runtime performance, and address web, cloud, and mobile modernization needs.
The research will seek to explore how organizations’ usage of COBOL has evolved and what strategy and attitudes are driving change in the future.
“Reliance on COBOL is quantifiably significant, we know that,” explains COBOL Working Group Co-Chair Derek Britton. “What we want to learn are the attitudes and requirements driving change to that COBOL application landscape. The IT world is constantly evolving, creating further requirement and opportunity to leverage COBOL. We’re trying to learn what’s on our horizon as a community.”
Get involved and sponsor now!
Led by Stephen Hendrick, VP Research at the Linux Foundation, in collaboration with COBOL Working Group leadership, the global study offers sponsorship opportunities to interested organizations that want to be involved. Interested businesses can view the research prospectus here.
The program will begin in January 2023 and the results will be published at Open Mainframe Summit 2023.
Contact research@openmainframeproject.org for more information.
