Your applications are no longer confined to their mainframe limitations, they are able to scale on demand and serve your customer. During the pandemic, welfare systems and unemployment services have not been able to scale and pay their beneficiaries. The press blamed COBOL programs but however, part of the truth was that their mainframes were not large enough to answer the volume of requests they received. As a result of this, welfare organizations could not afford the cost of the increase in transactions.

Though there may be some disagreement on exactly just how complex automatic translation to Java is, many would agree that problems arising from discrepancies in behavior between the original and translated code, as well as issues related to overflow, type casting, and other complicated type manipulations can most certainly cause delays in any automatic translation project. Overcoming these types of issues not only require extensive human intervention, but also produce atypical code that is much more difficult to maintain than handwritten Java. The bottom line is that unless you have a team of self-flagellating wizards that will enjoy the “challenge” of maintaining and tweaking the translated code, you can expect significant delays, cost overruns, and perhaps most importantly, a lack of enthusiasm for your project.

The cost of a mainframe is correlated to the business it conducts. If your business is growing, you are increasing the number of transactions, consuming more memory, more processors, more disk etc. This does not necessarily have to be a problem, as long as your margins are high, otherwise you’ll be burning cash faster than banking money. To stop the hemorrhage, the easiest solution is to recompile a significant part of your portfolio without modifying the code and run it on Azure.

When you have a big mainframe, its job is critical to running the business, and no CEO is ready to jeopardize their mainframe without serious reassurance. Legacy compilers do not pretend to improve COBOL or PL/I, rather they aim to deliver the same result that IBM does on z/Systems, but instead on Windows or Linux. It is necessary to conduct a mainframe migration which follows a risk mitigation strategy that is both smooth and incremental.

When your portfolio is migrated as is, it executes on .NET Core with a superior level of functionality and any new modules written in C# or VB.NET interact gracefully with the legacy code, allowing them to call or be called transparently by COBOL, PL/I or ASM 370 programs. It’s safer than any code conversion and it allows your portfolio to follow a gradual and transparent modernization.

Raincode has a partnership agreement with the major systems integrator and will not compete with your preferred S.I. Instead, we provide a liaison officer: an experienced engineer with authority and expertise to operate on the compiler and runtime libraries, that has direct access to the product development team and guarantees you an accurate and optimal use of our technologies.