The future of mainframe and COBOL in The Netherlands

CWI, the research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, organizes a strategic COBOL day in cooperation with Quuks and IBM.

The number of senior COBOL experts is rapidly diminishing; and measures are being taken. A new generation of programmers must be taught to engineer our essential digital infrastructures. Innovative software maintenance methods are being invented, based on AI and Software Language Engineering. Essential maintenance and renovation plans are being financed.

These developments are urgent, because COBOL-dependent organizations in our country are hard pressed for economic and fast solutions; maintaining the quality of long-lasting software infrastructure is a wicked problem. During this event stakeholders can inform each other timely of the best practices and the failed attempts. And new collaborations may be forged towards a brighter future for our COBOL and mainframe infrastructures.

This day connects the three strategic aspects of the future of COBOL software:

Technical: architecture, maintainability, evolvability, modeling, simulation, and generation.
Financial: sustainability of budgets for long-term cost-of-ownership and return-on-investment of proven technology
Personnel: turn-over, onboarding, knowledge and skill management, team compositions in a rapidly changing society.
COBOL: opportunities for today and the coming future
By bringing together demand, supply, and human expertise this event will provide new opportunities for (a) the development of effective techniques for managing COBOL systems today and for the coming future, (b) the development of new financial budgeting and reporting for sustaining proven and valuable COBOL software infrastructure (c) the forging of new meaningful collaborations between companies, governmental institutions, and research and educational institutes on all fronts.

Although COBOL technology is often described as “old” and “obsolete”, at this meetup we strive for a meaningful and positive-constructive discussion that is based on the reality of our future use of COBOL. This will be safeguarded by programming speakers who are strong stakeholders in COBOL technology, both on the demand and the supply side. In particular, we have speakers on the newest (scientific) insights with respect to modeling, simulation, and generation of COBOL code and mass automated analysis and transformation of COBOL code, and we get a glimpse of the future in mainframe technology by IBM and a vision of the future of the most popular COBOL IDE (Visual COBOL) by OpenText (formerly MicroFocus).

Programme
The preliminary programme will be published soon.

These are the names of the speakers that are already known:
Sander van Amerongen (ACICT)
Cokky Hilhorst (Nijenrode)
Jurgen Vinju (CWI)
Mark Grotenhuis (OpenText)
Reinier Vis (SIG)
Dennis Kornet (ABN-AMRO)
Matthijs Jansen (Quuks)

Register here