But I'm not surprised to see that Gartner is still predicting mass migrations off the mainframe in 3 to 5 years:
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." They've been predicting that for close to 20 years now, I think. Greg Shirey Ben E. Keith Company -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2014 3:20 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Meet Cobol's hard core fans I'm somewhat surprised to see an IBM employee publicly disclosing such business statistics. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN