COBOL has a long and illustrious history; after all, not many other languages have been in use since 1959 and are still going strong! But far from being a relic, COBOL continues to evolve and is finally getting the credit it deserves. The Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Working Group, which launched in 2020 as a response to increasing interest in COBOL (and misinformation about it), aims to promote and support the continued use of the COBOL language globally. One of its first missions: To identify the COBOL market, challenges, concerns and how companies are addressing these issues.

As a first step, The COBOL Working Group is partnering with The Linux Foundation Research team and the Linux Foundation Training & Certification team on a new COBOL research study. The research will seek to explore how organizations’ usage of COBOL has evolved, what use cases, strategies and attitudes are prevalent now and what the future holds for the language.
Hosts Alan Shimel and John Mertic are joined by Cameron Seay (E. Caroline Univ.), Misty Decker (Micro Focus) and Magie Hall (Vienna University) to provide more details about the milestones they’ve achieved , the new research study and more.