Mainframe modernisation is rarely a single decision. It is a choice between several distinct strategies, each with a very different cost, timeline, and risk profile, and the right answer depends on your business goals rather than on technology preference. Choosing “rewrite everything” when a replatform would do, or...
Enterprise Software
Articles, guides and tutorials on enterprise software, covering large-scale system design, procurement, integration and modernisation for large organisations.
“How much will it cost to move off COBOL?” is the first question every board asks, and the honest answer is that it depends on more than the size of the codebase. This guide breaks down what actually drives the cost of a COBOL migration in the UK, realistic budget and timeline ranges, and the risks that turn a...
Rust is an increasingly popular COBOL migration target for organisations that want both memory safety and high performance without a garbage collector. For safety-critical and performance-sensitive systems, its guarantees are compelling: whole classes of memory bugs are caught at compile time, and the resulting...
Go is a pragmatic COBOL migration target when simplicity, fast builds, and easy deployment matter more than a large enterprise framework ecosystem. It compiles to a single static binary with no runtime dependencies, it runs anywhere, and its built-in concurrency model is a natural fit for modernising COBOL batch...
Java is the most common destination for enterprise COBOL migration, and it is easy to see why. It is mature, strongly typed, backed by an enormous library ecosystem, and supported by one of the deepest developer hiring pools in the UK. For organisations running critical COBOL on IBM mainframes, Java offers a route to a...
COBOL still underpins a vast amount of the software running in UK banks, insurers, public sector bodies, and large retailers. Much of it processes money, and much of it has been running since long before the developers maintaining it today joined the organisation. As COBOL expertise retires out of the workforce, the...
COBOL powers an estimated hundreds of billions of lines of code still running in global financial systems, government infrastructure, and enterprise backends. In the UK, many of those systems are running in banks, insurance companies, public sector organisations, and large retailers. The developers who wrote them are...