Whether you shop at the supermarket, pick up a prescription at the pharmacy, submit an insurance claim, make an ATM transaction, trade stocks over the web or receive an electronic transfer of funds, COBOL Technology has touched your transaction. COBOL Technology supports over 200 billion lines of COBOL business applications. It is estimated that this number will grow at a rate of 5 million lines each year over the next five years.
There is broad agreement that effective implementation of COBOL Technology is a significant factor in meeting new business challenges. This is demonstrated by the essential role that IT places on COBOL Technology for enabling successful business initiatives. There are several ongoing COBOL Technology business challenges requiring near term resolution that are common to enterprises wanting to expand and grow their markets and they are:
Reducing internal business processes and costs
Updating customer response management systems
Improving the staff Knowledge Management systems
Business/legacy applications supported by COBOL Technology currently provide many of these functions. COBOL Technology is being updated in order to increase effectiveness and reduce total cost of operation of these applications.
Of the 200 billion lines of COBOL supported by COBOL Technology are used in global business applications today. It is estimated that 60 percent of these global business systems are predominantly written in COBOL supported by COBOL Technology and businesses have approximately five trillion dollars invested in them. There are approximately 90,000 COBOL programmers maintaining these systems. Business applications supported by COBOL Technology are predicted to grow by 5 billion lines of code annually and 15% of all new application functionality over the next five years will be written using COBOL Technology.
