In the News > United Kingdom

Unlike digital-first organisations, traditional businesses have a wealth of enterprise applications built up over decades, many of which continue to run core business processes.

In this series of articles we investigate how organisations are approaching the modernisation, replatforming and migration of legacy applications and related data services.

A general misconception is that the cloud is a home purely for new applications. In fact, many initiatives are underway to transform legacy applications such that they can take advantage of the cloud. Major players in the cloud world are contributing software infrastructure along with an open source model, to support this exponentially growing enthusiasm for cloud deployment.

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Do not go gentle into that good night…

COBOL, the programming language widely used to run Tier 1/mission-critical applications on mainframe computers – and popularly thought of in some trendy young corners to be a relic of the dark ages – is actually in rude good health.

That’s according to a new survey by Micro Focus today, which finds that after more than sixty years in the production environment, COBOL code bases are – perhaps startlingly to some – continuing to grow, as businesses modernise applications.

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A mainframe skills crisis and the need to innovate is forcing organisations to move from the mainframe to cloud deployment models.

Businesses are moving from the mainframe to cloud deployment models.

There are still the high end users of the mainframe, such as HSBC, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, the large global banks or insurance companies that still use the platform. But these users of the mainframe only account for a couple of hundred companies. What about the rest?

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A sudden wave of retirements has left the mainframe industry suffering from a skills shortage, according to figures compiled by LzLabs

Mainframe migration specialist LZLabs has carried out a global survey to get a clear picture of what is happening at a customer level and discovered that just shy of half of those responding saw the loss of skills to support applications as the main concern.

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Most businesses that are heavily reliant on mainframes fear a shrinking skills pool

Almost all IT decision makers believe mainframes are important to their business, but most of them are concerned about the computing environment.

The diminishing number of professionals with the required skills to support mainframe applications and operate them are seen as major problems for about half of IT decision makers.

The survey of 650 professionals at organisations with over 100 people, carried out by Vanson Bourne for software company LzLabs, found that two-thirds of businesses believe the loss of mainframe skills is a big risk to their entire business.

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