The big picture: COBOL is decades old yet it still dominates our IT ecosystem and even the economy. But a replacement must be found, if only because the number of developers that can work on the language is dwindling. Is AI the answer?
It’s 60-plus years old and there are better and more modern programming languages out there, but COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) is still with us. Not only is it an active part of the IT ecosystem but it arguably dominates it.
COBOL supports close to 90 percent of Fortune 500 business systems and runs 85 percent of all business transactions. In fact, you could go so far as to say that COBOL is a lynchpin in the world economy.
Systems powered by COBOL handle $3 trillion of daily commerce. COBOL handles 95 percent of all ATM card swipes and it makes 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions possible. “The second most valuable asset in the United States – after oil – is the 240 billion lines of COBOL,” says Philip Teplitzky, who’s slung COBOL for decades for banks across the US.
And this is a big problem.
For starters, there is a shortage of IT workers who can work with COBOL, a fact state governments became painfully aware of during the pandemic when they had difficulty finding technicians skilled in COBOL to work on their unemployment systems, which had become overwhelmed by the sudden spike in claims. COBOL and the mainframes they run on are also clunky and difficult to upgrade to support modern business activities like mobile.
All of this makes COBOL “a significant operating risk,” according to Maryland’s Information Technology Secretary Katie Savage. “For me, we’re making the business case around why from a security and workforce development perspective, we have to upgrade,” Savage said at the Google Public Sector Forum last year.
It persists, though, for a variety of reasons. Mainframes, as antiquated in IT years as they are, are still prized for their resiliency and security and, more importantly, are still able to carry on with the massive batch processing for which they were designed. These IT resources also represent a significant sunk cost for the businesses that have them and making the case for a modern platform at the cost of millions of dollars is difficult. Also, many software providers’ toolsets can interface with COBOL, which makes maintenance possible. It’s even possible to move COBOL to the cloud.
Most fundamentally, though, COBOL persists because it has no obvious successor. Sure, there are modern languages like Java or C# that could replace COBOL but for all the reasons above businesses and governments are not moving forward with them.
One bright spot emerged last year when IBM unveiled a generative AI tool to help developers facilitate faster translation of COBOL to Java.
But even this solution is probably not the answer, at least not yet. It still requires developers, and remember: the numbers who are trained on COBOL are rapidly diminishing. The developer may still need to perform some minor editing of the code that the AI provides, Skyla Loomis, IBM’s Vice President of IBM Z Software, says.
Furthermore, as Gartner Distinguished Vice President and Analyst Arun Chandrasekara points out, IBM has no case studies to validate its claims. “AI generation is an early-stage technology that takes time to perfect. I’m sure they have checks and balances in place to address this situation, but I prefer to take the ‘wait and see if it works’ approach.”
Basically, cost-conscious companies are mindful that it is still early days for generative AI. On the other hand, COBOL has been around for decades.
