LzLabs Launches Product to Move Mainframe COBOL Code to Linux Cloud

Somewhere in a world full of advanced technology that we write about regularly here on TechCrunch, there exists an ancient realm where mainframe computers are still running programs written in COBOL. This is a programming language, mind you, that was developed in the late 1950s, and used widely in the ’60s and ’70s and even into the ’80s, but it’s never really gone away. You might think it would have been mostly eradicated from modern business by now, but you would be wrong.

As we march along, however, the pool of people who actually know how to maintain these COBOL programs grows ever smaller by the year, and companies looking to move the data (and even the archaic programs) to a more modern platform could be stuck without personnel to help guide them through the transition.

That’s clearly a problem and LzLabs, a Swiss startup, saw a huge opportunity here. “The skill shortage in terms of maintaining the code that runs on the legacy mainframes has become acute. It’s become a huge problem finding the people to keep these going,” LzLabs CEO Mark Cresswell told TechCrunch.

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