Meet Cobol's hard core fans
Meet Cobol's hard core fans
These folks won't migrate. The reason probably isn't what
you're thinking.
Robert L. Mitchell
August 21, 2014 (Computerworld)
With the long-anticipated Cobol skills shortage starting
to bite, many businesses have been steadily migrating applications off the
mainframe. Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina has been doubling down.
The healthcare insurer processes nearly 10% of all
healthcare claims in the U.S., and uses six top-of-the line IBM zEnterprise
EC12 systems running millions of lines of optimized Cobol to process 19.4
billion online healthcare transactions annually. Its custom-built claims
processing engine has been thoroughly modernized and kept up to date, says BCBS
of SC vice president and chief technology officer Ravi Ravindra. "It was
always in Cobol, and it always will be."
Cobol was designed to handle transactional workloads, and
for large-scale transaction processing it still can't be beat, says Lonnie
Emard, vice president of IT at BCBS of SC and president of the Consortium for
Enterprise Systems Management (IT-oLogy), a nonprofit association of
businesses, vendors and higher education institutions dedicated to helping
build a talent pipeline for Cobol and other hard-to-fill IT-related
disciplines.
"We are the low-cost provider," Emard says.
"We couldn't do that if we weren't on the mainframe."
Some organizations continue to run the business using
Cobol on the mainframe simply because migrating all of that code to distributed
computing systems without a compelling business benefit wouldn't be worth the
trouble and expense. But some of the world's largest businesses see their Cobol
infrastructure not as fading legacy technology but as a state-of-the-art,
competitive weapon.
For both groups, the challenge lies in finding the next
generation of talent to run those systems or risk being forced off the
platform. "There's been no abatement in the number of people
retiring," says Adam Burden, lead for advanced technology and architecture
at Accenture, and the pipeline of new Cobol programming talent has been
insufficient to address the impending outflow of retiring baby boomers.
As businesses continue to struggle with the problem,
Accenture has been busy adding Cobol programmers to its consulting practice to
fill the skills gap for its clients, Burden says, even as IBM, IT-oLogy and
others attempt to train and recruit the next generation of mainframe talent.
The mainframe's stronghold
For many businesses in healthcare and other industries
with large-scale transaction processing needs, including airlines, retail,
banking and government, Cobol on the mainframe remains the core transaction
engine. Several mainframe vendors remain in the market, including Unisys,
Groupe Bull and Fujitsu, but IBM has the lion's share of the market today, with
more than 90%. And 50 years after IBM released its first mainframe, the
System/360, in April 1964, the company still has 3,500 mainframe customers.
What's next for zEnterprise
IBM is working to address several shortcomings of the
mainframe by focusing on three key areas, says Deon Newman, vice president of
IBM System z.
Analytics. IBM wants to provide more analytic
capabilities on the platform to reduce the need to continuously move
transactional data off the mainframe for processing. "Our customers want
to use it in real-time fraud detection, upselling and cross-selling. Some of
this will be on zLinux, and some on zOS," Newman says.
Mobile enablement. Java subsystems will allow enterprise
applications to be "extended out onto the Web," Newman says. And that
will lower some costs of doing business on the mainframe. IBM customers pay
based on the number of transactions processed, but many transactions, such as
balance inquiries, don't generate revenue. Mobile has greatly expanded the
problem, with more than half the workload coming in from the Internet and
mobile applications. So IBM recently discounted what it charges for mobile
transaction charges by 60%. "That means that software pricing won't
explode in the same way that mobile transactions are," he says.
Cloud. IBM is pushing the mainframe as a consolidation
platform for x86-based distributed computing in environments where server or
virtual machine counts exceed 200. It sees the mainframe as a cloud appliance
for hosting distributed computing workloads, and not just for folks who already
have a mainframe and have excess capacity to soak up: In April IBM released the
Enterprise Cloud System, a fully integrated Linux-based OpenStack-compliant
system with a utility-based pricing model.
-- Robert L. Mitchell
Some 23 of the world's top 25 retailers, 92 of the top
100 banks, and the 10 largest insurers all entrust core operations to Cobol
programs running on IBM mainframes, says Deon Newman, vice president, IBM
System z. Since 2010, around 50 to 75 customers have left the mainframe fold,
IBM says, while some 270 of IBM's 3,500 mainframe customers have come aboard as
new clients since then, Newman says.
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."
United Life Insurance Co. falls into the other 90%. The
midsize business migrated off its Unisys mainframe several years ago, but
didn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. It kept more than 1,000 Cobol
programs that run the business, recompiling those for Windows using Micro Focus
Visual Cobol, says program manager Jim Veglahn. "You don't just walk away
from one million lines of Cobol code," he says. And while it's harder to
fill open positions than it was a few years ago, Veglahn says his strategy is
to "stay on Cobol and train as needed."
But the demographic shift will, in the long term, make
Cobol "almost unsalvageable," says Vecchio. "The only debate is
the slope of the decline."
BCBS's Emard disagrees. "Can we keep up with the demand
for Cobol talent? Absolutely. The supply needs to be increased with the
knowledge that these jobs are not going away," he says.
Vecchio says the number of Gartner clients that want to
talk about mainframe migrations is up sharply. "I had 200 mainframe
migration inquiries last year, and I have been speaking with thousands of
mainframe shops about this whole migration question," he says. Mainframes
eventually will be marginalized to only the very largest organizations in the
market, Vecchio adds. "They're the only ones who can invest in initiatives
and create their own training programs," he says.
Streamlining mainframe applications
Even some of the biggest mainframe shops are streamlining
mainframe operations for non-core functions. BNY Mellon runs nine IBM System
z10s that supply a total of 54,000 MIPS of compute power and handle $1.5
trillion in transaction processing workloads each day. The Cobol codebase that
powers those systems has grown from 343 million lines two years ago to 357
million lines today, adding 2,500 new programs along the way.
"I believe it gives us a competitive advantage,
especially with the transaction volumes we're doing," says David Brown,
managing director and chief application architect.
But the growth of BNY Mellon's Cobol codebase reflects
enhancements to the bank's core transaction processing systems. Few
organizations, BNY included, are building entirely new applications in Cobol
anymore.
In other areas, BNY Mellon has also been steadily peeling
away mainframe applications that aren't strategic to its banking operations. It
has moved to packaged applications in some cases, recast some applications in need
of a heavy rewrite onto distributed computing platforms and pushed ad-hoc
reporting capabilities off the mainframe as well.
I believe [Cobol] gives us a competitive advantage,
especially with the transaction volumes we're doing. David Brown, Managing
Director And Chief Application Architect, BNY Mellon
"If you're doing sequential processing and you have
a mainframe footprint, that's where that functionality belongs," says
Brown. "But on things you're doing ad-hoc -- mobile, big data -- all of
those run better on distributed platforms."
When applications that used to be hosted on the mainframe
are re-hosted or rewritten to run on distributed computing platforms, however,
that makes things more complex when it comes to accessing data that still
resides back on the mainframe, Brown says.
To avoid that, he has been looking at hosting rewritten
applications on a zLinux partition on the mainframe. "I can rewrite a
piece of Cobol but closely interface with the mainframe program and database
without jumping between a mainframe box and a distributed box," he says.
As for BNY Mellon's core systems, Brown says, "I see
Cobol on the mainframe continuing on in perpetuity. Over half of our major
applications are still on the mainframe. It offers the best scalability,
reliability and availability for doing sequential processing."
Rebuilding the talent pipeline
The idea that Cobol and the mainframe are legacy
technology is a perception issue, BCBS of SC's Ravindra argues. It's a mindset
that has pushed students away from taking Cobol and other mainframe technology
courses, and convinced schools that they shouldn't offer mainframe-related
technologies in computer science curricula.
Despite efforts such as the 8-year-old IBM Academic
Initiative, the talent pipeline hasn't kept up as the baby boomers who dominate
today's mainframe shops begin to retire in larger numbers. "The market,
universities and junior colleges aren't generating enough developers to replace
those who are retiring," Gartner's Vecchio says -- a sentiment shared by
Emard.
"There was no pipeline for Cobol talent, and we
realized we couldn't do it by ourselves. It's costly to go it alone," says
Emard. So BCBS of SC helped form IT-oLogy. Emard says the goal is to make sure
that lack of talent doesn't force companies to move off the mainframe.
The initiative promotes awareness of job opportunities in
the discipline, college-level training, internships and cross-training of
existing IT professionals. IT-oLogy has doubled the number of schools offering
its Mainframe Academic Initiative, and the programs have reduced BCBS of SC's
onboarding costs by 50%, Emard says.
How IT-oLogy aims to close the skills gap
While programs like the IBM Academic Initiative promote
curricula to higher education institutions for Cobol and other mainframe
disciplines, universities weren't always receptive to the idea coming from a
vendor, says Lonnie Emard, president of the Consortium for Enterprise Systems
Management (IT-oLogy). IT-oLogy conveys the message that its members, including
Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, Time Warner Cable, Fidelity
Investments and other firms, are ready and willing to hire graduates with
training in Cobol and other hard-to-fill IT disciplines. "We're all about
skills in short supply," Emard says.
The program has three pillars:
Promote IT offers outreach to students in grades K-12 to
advocate for IT careers and talk about what IT skills will be in demand in the
future.
Teach IT is a collaboration between industry and academia
to ensure that curricula include subjects that meet the needs of businesses
hiring in the IT profession, as well as to provide internship opportunities.
Emard sees the program as a "minor league farm system" to develop
future IT professionals.
Grow IT focuses on professional development and cross-training
for existing IT professionals. -- Robert L. Mitchell
"Today kids have no bias against the mainframe.
They're just glad to hear that they can make $60,000 or $70,000 a year. If
someone is paying that kind of money it's a nonissue," he says.
Better development tools are also making training new
talent easier.
Newer versions of Cobol that work within the Eclipse and
.Net integrated development environments, such as Micro Focus Visual Cobol,
have made it easier to pull over existing developers from the object-oriented
side of the house, although the transition from object-oriented programming to
the procedural Cobol language is still jarring, says BNY Mellon's Brown.
"You can use the same tools with a common structure, but the paradigm is different,"
he says.
With modern development tools there's much less actual
coding involved. "At BCBS of SC we're not asking people to write lines of
pure Cobol code anymore," Emard says. Instead, the business uses an
application generator from Micro Focus. "The key is, how do you optimize
that with all of the other stuff that comes into play, such as the website and
mobile apps. But we still need folks who understand the development environment
that has Cobol at its core," he says.
The offshoring option
Offshoring can also help with the Cobol talent shortage.
"Accenture has seen a material increase in the number of resources we have
that are Cobol knowledgeable," in response to an increase in demand, says
Accenture's Burden. "Our clients are looking to third parties to maintain
these Cobol applications as it becomes more difficult due to the skills
shortage."
But not all businesses want to entrust to outsiders the
institutional knowledge of all of the business rules encoded in that Cobol
code. What's more, says Vecchio, "A lot of the Indian service providers
don't want to do Cobol and be the garbage dump for legacy apps. They want to
move upstream and be strategically involved."
U.K. retailer Tesco hired hundreds of local Cobol
programmers in India. "Our Cobol development community there is fairly
young," says Tom Kadlec, director of information services.
U.K.-based retailer Tesco runs millions of lines of Cobol
application code on a 70,000-MIPS zEnterprise EC12 mainframe infrastructure to
power its store replenishment, credit card authorization and settlement, and
payroll systems. Tesco avoided the institutional-knowledge issue by opening an
office in India and directly hiring hundreds of local Cobol programmers as
employees. And in India, Tesco doesn't have to worry about the impending
retirement of baby-boomer employees. "Our Cobol development community
there is fairly young," says Tom Kadlec, director of information services.
Like Ravindra, Kadlec has no intention of migrating the
core systems that run the business over to a distributed computing platform.
"The combination of our Cobol applications and the mainframe platform is
what gives us a competitive advantage," he says.
Preparing for the inevitable
At BNY Mellon, the talent crunch is still about five
years away, Brown estimates. Many of the bank's 300 to 400 Cobol programmers
were hired right out of college in the 1980s and range in age from 45 to 55,
Brown says. "We haven't had the big exodus yet," but as the economy
picks up he says he worries that the impending wave of retirements could come
sooner rather than later.
The company is working with universities and offshore
resources to bring in "younger blood" and get the talent pipeline
flowing. But so far, he says, it's been a slow process. Brown has been able to
fill vacancies as they crop up, but in the future, retention bonuses and pay
premiums may be required to acquire those scarce Cobol skills, he says.
While the types of companies using mainframes and the
types of workloads on the mainframe may be evolving, Cobol and related
mainframe skill sets will continue to provide jobs for the foreseeable future,
says Burden. "On a macro basis I haven't seen a material decline in the
amount of Cobol code that's out there." And for every program that does a
migration there are still a dozen running -- and those continue to grow and
evolve, he says. " I don't see that changing for a decade -- or
more," he says.
This article, Meet Cobol's hard core, was originally
published at Computerworld.com.
Robert L. Mitchell is a national correspondent for
Computerworld. Follow him on Twitter at Twitter twitter.com/rmitch, or email
him at rmitchell@computerworld.com.
Comments
Post a Comment