By Bruce Craig, Country Manager, Australia and New Zealand, Micro Focus

Integrating technology from fifty years ago with the 21st century is no easy task. One couldn’t, for example, sync their iPod with a gramophone, upload a document to a typewriter or text a friend from a phone box. Yet much of the technology that underpins the day-to-day running of our financial and government systems is inextricably linked to an innovation that was invented more than 50 years ago.

In 1959, the Pentagon laid down the guidelines that would form the basis of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language). Whilst such a prominent building will no doubt have played host to more momentous conferences, few, if any, will have gone on to have such a marked influence upon the future of business technology.

Over the following decades, COBOL developed an almost ubiquitous relationship with enterprise IT. As financial corporations and government departments increased their reliance on digital information, underpinning the IT infrastructures of virtually every major organisation were large, reliable COBOL-based applications.

As a result, COBOL is everywhere today, yet is largely unheard of among the millions of people who interact with it on a daily basis. Its reach is so pervasive that it is almost unthinkable that the average person could go a day without it.

Whether using an ATM, stopping at traffic lights or purchasing a product online, the vast majority of us will use COBOL in one form or another as part of our daily existence. Despite the advent of new technologies, computing languages and platforms over the last fifty years, many core banking systems still run on COBOL.

The statistics surrounding COBOL attest to its huge influence upon the business world. There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL in existence, equating to about 80 per cent of the world’s actively used code. 80 per cent of point-of-sales transactions are run through COBOL, and there are estimated to be over a million COBOL programmers in the world today. Also, 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches.

COBOL works because of its simplicity. Ever since the idea was hatched five decades ago, COBOL aimed to provide a common standard for programmers based on using plain English and simplifying coding for developers and businesses alike. COBOL programmers appreciate this and it is a better guarantee of employment than almost any other form of IT specialty.

The versatility of COBOL has also played a part in its abundance and longevity. Applications first developed to run on IBM System, 700 mainframes are now being readied to move onto an Amazon or Microsoft cloud computing platform. COBOL’s propensity for modernization is unparalleled, making it not only effective but also cost-effective. In today’s turbulent economic climate, modernising existing COBOL systems is an attractive prospect for CIOs looking to ‘do more with less’.

Perhaps most crucially though, COBOL systems dating back a number of decades still exist today because of the immense investment of hours and resources which have been spent on them during this time. Because of their longevity, these systems have evolved with the business, and become crucial corporate assets in their own right. Given the competitive advantage these bespoke systems provide, they are far more than just a cost on the balance sheet.

Despite its dominance, it would seem the main risk facing COBOL in the 21st century is finding and training enough professionals to maintain all 220 billion lines.

Ensuring COBOL remains a crucial part of the IT skills set must be a key priority for business, government and academia alike over the coming years, as the effects of a serious shortage could be disastrous. The cost of re-writing COBOL programs is estimated at around $25 per line. With over 200 billion such lines in existence, it doesn’t take a mathematician to decipher that this would be a heavy cost for organisations to bear, let alone the disruption to operations caused by lengthy re-write strategies.

The need for skills is all the more apparent given that COBOL has reached yet another critical juncture in its evolution. The advent of cloud computing is the latest step which the language will have to take if its influence is to continue in the 21st century, yet one that it seems equal to.

COBOL applications have continually shown their ability to adapt to new platforms, and the emergence of the cloud should prove no different. Whilst the cloud has the potential to revolutionise the way information technology is delivered, it is the applications that run on these platforms that will continue to perform the functions most valuable to the business.