Significant COBOL/CICS Still in Use

IT has spent many decades and many millions of dollars trying to move away from COBOL. Rewrites that were attempted have largely failed. Many were never completed. Those that were completed (usually over budget and behind schedule) failed to deliver the functionality required. Or, they performed so poorly that deployment was not a practical option. As a result, today more than 220 Billion lines of COBOL code continue to run approximately 80%+ of daily business transactions (80 Billion business transactions per day compared to 3 billion Google searches per day). IT’s “solution” has been to buy more mainframe MIPS to execute the inefficiencies faster or to migrate COBOL from the Mainframe to COBOL running on Client/Server systems. This tactical approach somewhat reduces costs but does not address the COBOL skills issue nor does it move IT closer to a lower cost, efficient and more strategic development/execution environment like Java.

Case Study

A transportation company on the east-coas (USA) wanted to consider moving their entire COBOL/CICS billing application off their $787,000, IBM Z-Series, 335 MIP Mainframe. They contracted with a highly regarded Systems Integration firm to manage an evaluation.

Three representative batch billing jobs written in IBM COBOL were recompiled into Micro Focus COBOL and run on a low-cost, single quad core Dell server with 4GB RAM under the control of a Micro Focus runtime with an Oracle 11g database on a Pentium IV server with 2 GB RAM. The resulting execution times were then compared to the mainframe running those same jobs. Next, the steps described above were essentially repeated. But instead, the three jobs were recompiled into Java source and Java byte code using HCI’s Elastic COBOL Enterprise Developer and executed on the same server under the control of HCI’s Elastic Transaction Platform and the Java Runtime Environment.

Results

With Micro Focus – The three jobs took a total of 11 hours to execute versus 3.69 hours on the mainframe.

It was felt that there could have been some undetected bug causing the huge time difference but because of time considerations and the performance of the HCI compiler, additional investigation was not pursued.

With Heirloom – The three jobs executed in 4.13 hours on the Dell Xeon server and 3.69 hours on the mainframe. Both the batch and CICS jobs ran (with excellent response times) after a single compilation and produced the results expected without tuning or optimization. Because HCI enables maintenance and new development to be performed by COBOL or Java programmers, HCI was the ideal solution.

COBOL/CICS to Java via HCI’s ECE

Heirloom Computing, Inc. (HCI) introduced the Elastic COBOL Enterprise Developer (ECE) and the Elastic Transaction Platform (ETP) in early 2011. ECE automates the conversion from COBOL/CICS to Java. ECE is the ideal solution for IT departments that seek to realize the strategic advantages of Java development and execution by automating the transition out of COBOL/CICS; while ETP ensures that Java exhibits the expected performance characteristics of the previous COBOL/CICS applications. ECE is an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment that compiles COBOL/CICS applications to both Java source and Java byte code for execution under JRE or J2EE.

Prove it to yourself by trying ECE for two weeks free on the cloud at www.elasticcobol.com.

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