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Blog | COBOL | Open Mainframe Summit

Learning COBOL is Much More than just taking a Class (Video)

By | November 23, 2022

At Open Mainframe Summit, which took place on September 21-22 virtually and in-person in Philadelphia, PA, Misty Decker, Director of Worldwide Product Marketing, AMC Portfolio at Micro Focus, gave a keynote presentation titled, “Learning COBOL is Much More than just Taking a Class.”

After decades in the shadows, understanding COBOL has seen a massive resurgence in recent years, thanks to the Open Mainframe Project.  With a curriculum published and a core of universities now teaching COBOL, what’s the next step?

In this keynote session, we’ll use industry research to ask ourselves how to expand COBOL education beyond learning the language itself. The session will discuss topics such as modernizing existing COBOL applications, leveraging open source and taking advantage of other modern technologies such as containers, cloud and microservices. We will also investigate complementary educational opportunities such as mentoring, contributing to open source and advocacy.

Immerse yourself in contemporary COBOL’s credentials.

In Misty’s keynote, she references the announcement of a new COBOL research study in collaboration with the COBOL Working Group, the Linux Foundation Research and the Linux Foundation Training and Certification. This project seeks to achieve a detailed understanding of the extent to which vendor investments in COBOL have continued, enabling COBOL to significantly increase its interoperability with development environments like Java and .NET, runtime performance, and address web, cloud, and mobile modernization needs.

The research will seek to explore how organizations’ usage of COBOL has evolved and what strategy and attitudes are driving change in the future. Learn more about the COBOL research or how to sponsor it here. You can also email research@openmainframeproject.org for more information.

If you missed any of the other Open Mainframe Summit keynotes or presentations, you can view them on the Open Mainframe Project Youtube Channel – click here for the playlist.