Microsoft Makes Push for COBOL Migration

Posted by Cliff on Sunday November 9, 2003 @11:15AM from the trusting-your-legacy-code-to-.NET dept.

geoff313 writes: "It would appear that Microsoft is making a real push for the migration of existing COBOL applications to Windows and their .Net platform. Micro Focus, a company who makes COBOL migration products and last year became a member of Microsoft's Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, announced their Net Express with .Net product, a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003. It allows for COBOL code to be integrated and manged with other code in Visual Studio. In an interview with eWeek he declares that 'Micro Focus and Microsoft are bringing the mainframe to Windows and .Net'. This makes me wonder, are there any Open Source projects working to provide for this eventual migration? Gartner estimates that over 75% of business data is processed by an approximately 200 billions lines of COBOL, so this seems like a huge potential market to lose to Microsoft."

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Best migration is to Microfocus cobol FOR LINUX by internet-redstar · 2003-11-09 13:53 · Score: 1, Redundant

It's unbelievable that nobody posted this yet, but MicroFocus Cobol is available for Linux! When you have an installation of MicroFocus on any platform, you can easily migrate to Linux because of this.
We did this ourselves for a customer (insurance company) coming from HP-UX. With code being developed and expanded over a period of 25 years, there's a lot of business logic inside that just is _priceless_ for these companies.
By replacing their 10 year old systems with brand new, super-cheap, (comparable) super-fast Linux boxex, they are very satisfied (especially when fax/web/filesharing opensource tools are added for a low fee).