Name: The State & the Future of COBOL
Uploaded: 2025-12-02T16:31:05.886Z
Duration: 1 h 4 min 8 s
Description: The State & the Future of COBOL

Transcript for "The State & the Future of COBOL": Hello. Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Sava, and we at Rocket are very happy to welcome you to our today's session around the state and the future of Cobol. The first question for today is, can you hear me okay? Can you see the presentation? Something we need to get over with as soon as possible. So please let me know in the chat. K. I see a lot of yes and yes. Thank you so much. And we will wait a couple of more minutes for more people to join us today. So we will start approximately in, like, one minute. And while we're waiting, please please feel free to, to send in a chat where are you joining from because I see good mornings, good afternoons. So it's really, really interesting where you're joining from. Personally, I'm joining from Lithuania. It's a country in Eastern Europe, and very happy to be here with you today. Germany Germany, Canada, Oklahoma. Okay. We have a global global audience today, which is really, really nice. And thank you so much for joining us. I know that December is a really busy period for everybody, so appreciate it. We have a very packed agenda, so it's gonna be interesting. Spain, Texas. See a lot of neighbors. Netherlands, Germany, Sweden. That's nice. So I think we're gonna start. We're still gonna dedicate some time to housekeeping, so it will allow more people to join us in a few minutes. So hi, everyone. My name is Saba. I'm product marketing manager here at Rocket, and I would like to dedicate some time to housekeeping just to make sure that we have as smooth experience for you as possible. So first things first, we're gonna record today's session, and we're gonna share the recording with you shortly tomorrow. We're also gonna share the presentation on the community forum that we have, and it will be distributed tomorrow on Wednesday. We would like this session to be as engaging as possible. It's December. Everybody's busy, so we want to keep it as interactive for you as we can. So please feel free to use the chat when we have some questions for you. And if you have questions for our speakers, please use q and a tab. It's right next to the chat you can see on the screenshot, and send the question to us. We will have some time for live q and a at the end, and our speakers, Scott and Jen, will answer them at the end. And last but not least, again, we have this type of sessions on a regular basis, and we always strive and aim to improve those and make sure that we provide you as much value as possible. So there will be post event survey at the end, five short and sweet questions. So please share your feedback. This is how you help us to keep these webinars interactive and helpful for you and your businesses. I would like also to give a big, huge, enormous shout out to the product management and marketing team and extended team of engineers and everybody who's standing behind Rocket Coble and Coble modernization products. So here you see some familiar faces like Scott and Jen who will present today, and you see other teammates and specialists who make sure that Coble application mission critical Coble applications are in good hands and modernized to meet today's requirements. So thanks to the team and thanks for you, our customers, for making this, business thriving. It's been eighteen months. It's honestly crazy to think about it, but it's more than a year and a half since Rocket Software acquired COBOL modernization business last year in May, June period, and it's been a very eventful period for us. We showed that COBOL and Rocket Software is very serious about COBOL and COBOL modernization, and it's something you can see on events that happened throughout the last eighteen months and more. So we had two major releases. Last year represented 10.o, and this year represented Rocket Visual Cobble 11.o. We started to working with Gen AI capabilities with, chatbot interface in 2024, and we extended Gen AI capabilities this year drastically, and we're gonna show you the demo of those today. And ten year road map or more of a, like, manifesto from us is showcasing our commitment and how serious we are around COBOL and COBOL modernization. And, again, we've kinda dedicate some time today, and you can get access to this road map by request. So we will share more details, later. And okay. I think we're ready to kick off the main part of today's session. And we decided to start it with a fun thing to do. AI is everywhere. It's shaping, reshaping workflows and processes and companies, and we decided to play with it a little bit and think what would famous person would tell will will tell or quote about Cobble today. And we started with Albert Einstein. Of course, he has a lot of amazing quest quotes about simplicity and everything around it, but we decided to stop on this quote that was generated by GenAI, but still kinda makes sense in the context of that. So the measure of intelligence is the ability to adapt without losing what works. And it falls under what we do here at Rocket, making sure that business logic and data and your mission critical applications that has been working for decades successfully for you are still driving new business value for you today and in the future. So Albert Einstein and Jenny Ai, thank you for this amazing quote. The next one is one and only Grace Hopper, the person who introduced Cobble to the world in 1959. And the fun thing we kinda see in Grace Hopper. So she was visionary. She was a pioneer. And actually, she kinda predicted the trend that we see unveiling today. So Cobble is based on plain language. So a lot of English around Cobol, and this is what makes Cobol kinda relatively easy to learn, in comparison to other programming languages. And today in 2025, when we see the boom of Gen AI assistance, Gen AI chatbots, and AI agents, we see how developers are going back to what Grace Hopper saw in development. So right now, developers are working a lot in plain English. They're writing prompts to all those tools, and then they work with code. And we found it very, very interesting that Grace kind of predicted this trend, and we see the parallel between Cobble and today's development. And Cobble, again, shows how, how relevant it is today, which is really, really interesting. And it's a holiday season, so today we're gonna have a quiz at the end with more winners than ever, and we're gonna give some gifts during the webinar. So the first gift giveaway and prize giveaway will be around the quote. So this is someone more shy than Grace Hopper and Albert Einstein, someone who is usually stands somewhere, in the shadows. And this is the quote. Is there one thing I admire about Cobble? Its real reliability. So while the world rushes to shiny new toys, Cobble quietly keeps to sleep running year after year without missing delivery. Please use the chat to send who do you think provided this quote, and you will win the first the first prize of today's session. Okay. It was it it was quick. So I think Alan let it, who actually answered correctly will get will get the first prize of today's. So, yeah, it was Santa dot ai, and we will reach out to you, after the webinar, probably next week, about and share the details about the gift. And thank you for all the answers. I like all the options that you provided. But, yeah, it was Santa. On that note, I will hand it over to Scott Nielsen, vice president of here at Rocket, and he will walk you through today's session. Scott, there you go. Thanks, Can I just check if you can hear me okay? Thumbs up? Yes. Everything. is. perfect. Thanks, Sava. Thanks for that great introduction today. We'll see Sava, a little later on today. As he said, he's got some more quiz questions for me. Sava's been raiding the marketing swag bag, and he's rummaged around there and found loads of great gifts. So stick around till the end and, try your luck at the mega quiz he's got planned. You never know. You might leave today with a a few gifts for you. In between now and then, though, you've got myself and Jen Osborne. We're gonna be taking you through the future of COBOL today. And certainly, while we're gonna be looking at COBOL, the language itself, we'll be looking at some syntax evolution. This is, of course, as much about the applications that are written in COBOL and the businesses that depend on them and what the future of those applications look like. Now, we sit I think it's fair to say, we sit at the center of the universe when it comes to COBOL, and certainly we're amongst COBOL's biggest fans. I don't think any surprises there or or any gifts as a result for that. But, what we're endeavoring to do to set out today is to share with you the insights that we hear from hundreds of conversations we're connected to in our customers about what they're planning to do with their COBOL applications and there's quite a variety of different approaches. So yes, we've got an opinion. Yes, you're going to see some of our technology on display today. We certainly got strong opinions about that, but we're really trying to share with you insights that hopefully help you plan your application modernization journeys. And so without further ado, before we really talk about the the future of Cobalt, I think it's important to understand the current context of Cobalt today and look at some of the challenges that people are facing. And I think there's a particularly important key challenge that we need to, take into account here because it's so fundamental that it affects, there's certainly a lot of decision making that sits around this. And what I'm talking about here is the perception of COBOL itself. That's something I'd like to explore with you very briefly. And to help you, understand my point of view on this, if you don't mind, let's run a little quick thought experiment here. And I'd like you to think about a car. Conjure up an image of a car in your mind. Shouldn't take too long, I'm sure. And there's no wrong answers here. Any kind of car is gonna work for the purposes of this experiment. And maybe if you're an f one fan, you're gonna see some sort of formula one car in your mind or maybe some sort of electric vehicle. You know, thousands of options. But you know, I might be a bit surprised if the answer that you came up with would look like this in your mind's eye. It's certainly a car, isn't it? It's got four wheels, it's got a steering wheel, it's got an engine that goes forwards. I think it probably goes backwards to this model, you know, but what we're looking at here is a car from more than a 100 years ago, one of the first production, mass produced cars. And really to judge the automotive industry or to judge car technology based on a car from one hundred years ago probably wouldn't really be fair to the automotive industry, would it? And so keep that in mind when I now ask you to think about the following, you know, to think about COBOL, but and conjure up an image. But I don't want your perception of COBOL. I want you to think about what your colleagues in IT, what their perception of COBOL is. Those that sit in IT but maybe outside of the world of COBOL, what would they be conjuring up in their mind when thinking about COBOL? And I think the chances are, you know, all too well that the kind of thing that they're gonna think about probably is going to look a bit more, like this here. You know, these old pictures of, aged hardware and maybe even image of Grace Hopper. And if there's one thing that everyone knows about Cobalt, even if they're not working in it day in day out, is that it was invented an awful long time ago. In 1959, it was designed. And, you know, this is something that people really struggle with and really struggle to reconcile the fact that the technology dates back to then but is in still in use today. And, of course, the problem that we're seeing here is that people are falling into the trap of judging COBOL by yesteryear's standards and what it used to look like. To be fair though, I think if you open, you know, the average COBOL application and take a look at some code, you are very likely going to see something that was written many years ago. Like today, if you look out on the street, you're not gonna see a model t driving past anytime soon. But if you open a COBOL application, you're likely to see some code that was written, potentially several decades ago. So I think it's important when we're thinking about the perception of COBOL to bring ourselves up to date with what current COBOL, dialect and syntax looks like. And so I want to share with you just here, a quick snippet of what modern contemporary cobalt looks like with rocket cobalt. And, maybe it's important to acknowledge, first of all, as much as what we're not seeing as much as what we are. Because because what we're not seeing, first of all, is reams and reams of upper case COBOL. We're not seeing, superfluous sections and divisions that are just unnecessary in this little snippet. What we're looking at is a rather neat, concise program, and I'm sure you can see it's calculating the Fibonacci series. And it's doing that using recursion. Right? Now while recursion is not necessarily a recommended way for writing software, I'm sure someone will tell me that quickly if I don't point it out. But using recursion does mean your language that you're using does need to have certain constructs available to it. Like, in this case, a parameterized section or implicitly that what also brings in, local variables in COBOL as well. Right? And I think this is quite different to what most people expect COBOL to look like based on what they typically see. But this is really a much more accurate depiction of today's COBOL. Now the question I think to ask ask ourselves is why does this matter? Is this important at this stage of COBOL's evolution? And there are several practical reasons why it does. And the first one is because, you know, as far as we're concerned, there is no turnkey solution that takes your COBOL application, an arbitrary COBOL application, and converts it to some other language in whatever your target choice is, whether it's Java or Go or Python or whatever it may be. Of course, that that target may have changed over the years. But I say no turnkey solution. I emphasize turnkey by meaning you could take any language, any global application, and turn it into a native target of your choice, you know, as if you had written it to start in that in that language. So it's using the appropriate architecture and frameworks. That does not exist today. And so while that isn't available, we are endeavoring to ensure customers can solve challenges that they have today in Cobalt itself. And one of which will be simply onboarding new people to work in Cobalt and maintain and develop these applications moving forward. And these are the Gen zers of this world, aren't they? And they are going to need access or that, things that are available in the language that they're familiar with today, like parameterized sections, like local variables. So this and many other things that we've added, help with that onboarding, challenge that organizations have today. But there's another important reason as well that we can see where this syntax plays in, and that's in the world of agentic and copilots. Right? We're right at the early stage of it. Although, GenAI has progressed so rapidly, but it's still effectively embryonic. But over the next ten years or so, Copilot's, agentic programming is going to become the mainstay for most developers. And those systems will need to take what you're asking them to produce and and write concise and efficient code. And so this syntax is going to help support those kind of workflows as well. Now let me before we, leave this car analogy, let me just, mention one more thing to you here about the car industry because I learned recently that, actually, the top 10 automotive manufacturers around the world use a variety of Rocket Cobalt products, and several of whom I know, for a fact, also use Rocket Cobalt, including luxury car manufacturers, in The UK and elsewhere in Europe. Now COBOL wasn't around when the model t was developed, of course, but, you know, when business computing became the norm and COBOL was around at that time in its heyday, certainly, the car manufacturers took great advantage of it. And they use it in many areas, including on the shop floor that you see here in the production line and, indeed, in dealing management systems and everywhere in between. Now let's take a look at the market for COBOL and understand who's using it and where they're deploying it. Now the way I'm gonna start with this story today is actually looking at our market, the distributed Coble, which we're describe describing as Rocket Coble today, but I'm talking about applications deployed on distributed platforms. And we'll expand our view of the world to cover more platforms, at the end of this section. But when I talk about Rocket Coble, the first thing to be aware of is more than one product line. There's several generations and several families of products that our customers are using. What are they using Coble for? Well, all the things that I think everyone on this call will know from everything in finance, from banking to insurance to payroll, automotive as we saw, logistics, retail, and more besides. But there's also another classification of use cases for COBOL, and that's in the software industry itself because there's many software companies who wrote applications in COBOL probably in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and they continue to deploy and sell these applications in a variety of markets today. So, again, core banking system for it in Cobalt, warehouse management systems, ERPs, CRMs, and then into interesting areas like airline maintenance schedules or even sports statistics applications, one of my favorite examples, and many, many more besides. So there's far more use cases than just mere finance, that people don't often credit COBOL for. Now how many users of Rocket COBOL applications are there out there in the world? And I cannot give you an accurate answer to that, but I can give you some idea. And I spent some time thinking about five really major ISV applications and and direct customers I know about. And thinking about their end users around the world. And I very quickly got to a number that had very nearly nine zeros on it. Right? And I think if we start to add more of our customer base, we'll blow right through that number. So it's absolutely extraordinary the number of people on the planet Earth that are connected to rocket cobalt applications of one kind or another. Now what are they use what are they doing with these applications? Well, on the one hand, these applications certainly been around a lot longer than people expected. They're coming more and more ingrained within the business, and organizations are getting more value out of them. They're moving them to the cloud. They're API enabling them. More users are connected to them. They're deployed on more servers. So the footprint of the applications is getting bigger, and the footprint of the code itself is also getting bigger. Now on the other hand, we're also seeing some organizations retire those applications, so applications do naturally come to end of life. And then also we see some companies that may feel that they cannot achieve what they need to do with those applications, so they decide to replace them. And they're either purchasing, an off the shelf solution, a package, or they're rewriting them themselves. Usually, nowadays, no one tries to rewrite a COBOL application because they're just too large. They will use some sort of automated refactoring tool, but, ultimately, that's what it's trying to do is to rewrite the application. Now that whole area of of modernization is probably the subject of another webinar where we could go into the detail there. And I'm not gonna belabor this point too much. But suffice it to say, and I as I'm sure many of you on the call will know from only their own your own experience, that replacement project is incredibly difficult to to deliver on. And one of the reasons for that is that it's not only that Cobalt has been around for a long time. It's the applications that have been written in Cobalt. They have been around for a long time too. So they're deeply ingrained in the company's business processes. And in many cases, they reflect those business processes. So if you're going to, you know, change that application, you're effectively ripping out the, you know, the foundations of your business and having to replace those foundations again with a new system. Clearly, that's quite a challenging process to undertake if you're also trying to run your business at the same time. Now, why don't we now invite Jen to the stage? She'd been waiting patiently, to come in onto the stage here to talk to you more about where you're running your applications. Hi, Jen. Hello. Hi. Thanks, for the introduction. So, yeah, as we know, COBRA has been around for for decades. And what I think is quite unique and quite nice about Cobol is that you can track how IT has evolved by following Cobol's journey. So, you know, back towards the start, Kobo is mainly found on host systems. So, you know, IBM Z, Fujitsu, Unisys, those kind of host systems. And then over time, they get they get they were deployed to more of a UNIX system. Today, primarily we see just three, HP UX, Oracle, Solaris. Those two are kind of approaching end of life. So the main one that we see, which will be around for the foreseeable future will be IBM AIX. And then we kinda get to the nineteen nineties and then we see a major shift towards what we call commodity platforms, Windows and Linux. So you may think that that simplifies things whereas it makes it more complicated in many respects. Because even in these commodity platforms, you know, if you look at Linux, there's several different distributions. You know, we have Amazon Linux. We have, SUSE Linux. By far and wide, Red Hat is the most, popular that we see, in our Cobo base. We have something like 70% of our customers are using Windows or Linux. So it is a very, very big proportion of our customer base. Just one thing I found I found out the other day and I think that's fascinating is that, Rocket Software, we have something like a 150 different, platform combinations that we test on, which is absolutely, you know, that is huge when you take into consideration, operating system versions, 32 bit versus 64 bit architecture, deployment models. I think that was a very interesting fact to find out. That's x 86. That's where we see a lot of our customers. But what we're seeing towards the future is the rise of ARM technology and especially in, cloud environments. And why is this? So energy consumption is a major topic for the cloud service providers. So, you know, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. So they are trying to incentivize their customers to move to Arm technologies because Arm is a lot more energy efficient than x 86, and then we're kinda seeing the knock on effect of that. So a lot of our customers are wanting to move to these Arm technologies. And that's operating systems, but, you know, as we know, these these things, that's really just the the foundation. In actual fact, the story is more blended than ever. We have the big three databases, so IBM DB2, Oracle, SQL Server. We're also seeing the rise of open source databases like Postgres. A lot of our customers are using Docker containers, Java, and dot net integration. We are seeing a wide, wide variety of what customers are doing. And I think that's great. But what I would love to know actually is from our audience themselves. So if you can put in the chat and we can get a bit of, an interaction, I'll pass back to Scott. But where do you guys run your applications? I'd love to see maybe a bit of a mix of what everyone's doing. Yeah. I'll pass back to Scott. Thank you. Thanks, Jen. Thanks, Jen. We'll hear from Jenny a little later on, when she comes back to do a little demo for us, a Jen AI demo later on. But as she was saying there, I think that's really important to recognize that COBOL portability has been really valuable in establishing the business case to reuse COBOL applications on different infrastructure over the year. And even though we've sort of seen a lot of consolidation on the platforms, it's still a moving feast, this landscape. There's still a lot of change going on in the market there. And I think more than ever, perhaps, that portability will be an important asset to a company and why they might consider to use it. So if you think about the rush to cloud ten years ago, you know, now what do we see? Well, maybe it's everything's a lot more hybrid now or people are thinking about multi cloud options, you know, just to make sure that they don't get locked into any one vendor, and running applications across perhaps different infrastructure. So again, talking back to the portability that COBOL has offered in the past. Now let's just kind of wrap up our view on the market for COBOL. I've been talking about very much Jen and I have been talking about Rocket COBOL and distributed applications, but COBOL is obviously running on a lot more platforms and host systems, from IBM z infrastructure, and, of course, other host systems, mid range systems that you see on the right hand side there, like Unisys and Fujitsu. And in fact, that group of of host systems, many of those are considered end of life platforms and the organizations that run Cobol on those systems have to have a decision to make. Are they going to rewrite them or are they gonna reuse them? And if they decide to reuse them, which is often the case, they're gonna bring them onto a distributed platform. And, actually, we see new customers, new applications. I mean, it's an existing COBOL application, but it's a new application on Rocket COBOL running on distributed platforms. And the world of, enterprise, COBOL and IBM z, you know, which, you know, perhaps represents, you know, the single most powerful, performant available system, you know, in a singular box that you can run your business systems on. Even there, we're seeing organizations, you know, embrace hybrid. And while the mainframe may stay at the center of their infrastructure, they will be selectively replatforming workload to commodity systems. So all in all, you know, COBOL use cases are growing in Rocket as a result of these different systems. Great example of that recently is around Santander. We've been going through a modernization journey with their systems over the course of several years now. And recently, very recently, they, moved some workload, for their Spain operations. What was particularly impressive for Pathless was the scale of the workload. I don't think we've ever seen anything of quite that size before. And I'd really encourage you to go read the press release about that because it was a phenomenal effort by the Santante Santander team. So, congratulations to them as they pursue further modernization projects in their organization. Now as well as that flexibility that COBOL has afforded around infrastructure modernization, there's also something to be said about the flexibility of the business logic itself, as you can kind of get a sense of here in our fictitious bank, acmecorpbank.com, who've been a very successful bank, let me say, over the years. Because as you can see, they've had to respond to the changing demands of their customer base, you know, and how they want to access financial services, you know, from ATMs through to telephone banking, Internet banking, mobile banking, and more. And to do that, they've had to embrace different technologies and different architectures, thin client, thick client, different programming languages, Java, dot net, now Python, and using different protocols for accessing that web their business logic for things like SOA, do you remember, and web services and REST and microservices and maybe even serverless computing in use at Acme Corp. Right? But, they've done that all by reusing the COBOL applications underpinning those the original financial services that they created. Right? And and it's one of the reasons why these systems are still in in use. If you're wondering why COBOL is still around, that is a very important reason that they've been able to reuse it. But now we see the advent of agentic, systems appearing and you may think, well, maybe that, you know, spells the end of some of these applications. I think quite the opposite, you know, because I think we're just gonna fall into a very tried and tested pattern of reuse here. We're gonna see agentic, systems, orchestrating activities across a range of applications and systems, including COBOL. And why does the agentic system care what language it's written in? Right? To deliver highly individualized, highly customized user experiences. And if you talk to anyone in banking or or insurance, you'll understand just how important is them for to stay competitive to provide that individualized personalized experience, and Agenstic is going to help them do that. But probably the real challenge that organizations will have is the scale now that's of of of workflows around those global systems that's suddenly going to take hold as a result of more and more gen, AI use cases. So the question was, can those global systems scale? Can they be deployed to meet the demands of this future gen AI and the GENTIC use case? Now let's let's come back to the development tool, use case for a moment. We we showed a screenshot of COBOL earlier on. We were just examining the COBOL code. We weren't really looking at the toolset that sat around it. It's time to put our attention on that for a moment and talk about a topic you can never escape when we hear about COBOL, which is around skills and the availability of developer skilled in COBOL. It's the industry press's favorite topic when it comes to legacy systems. And what I would say is if if your if your organization is talking about skills challenge and these are the kind of tools that your organization is using for development, then I certainly would agree you probably got a pretty significant skills issue that you're trying to grapple with. But I might also say that probably that it's a symptom of a lack of investment in modern contemporary tooling for developers because the world has really certainly moved on a long way. Now I say that on the other hand. On the other hand, I know I've spoken to many seasoned developers who've been using these tools for decades. Right? And the muscle memory they have in operating these tools is incredible. You know, they can get a lot of work done. But as an onboarding experience for new developers, this is not where they should start. Right? The today's developer is a multi language developer. They're probably a multi platform developer. They embrace DevOps and automation and agile. They've probably never known, a time when they could write code and throw it over a wall for a QA team to go and test it for them. You know, that just does not happen for them. They they have to take responsibility for testing and automating applications. Really very different to how software was developed some years ago. You know? And and in that case, they need tools that help them achieve all of those aims. Right? And certainly, we recognize that, a decade or more ago by incorporating COBOL into modern industry standard tool sets like Visual Studio and Eclipse, which we continue to support millions of developers around the world using those. But look at Visual Studio Code and look at just how rapidly that toolset has been adopted by the development community. We've seen tens of thousands of downloads of our toolset integrated into Visual Studio Code because it is so flexible. It's multi platform. It's highly customizable, and we anticipate it just to continue to to grow and grow in adoption. You can see it's a bit of a plug for our products. Apologies for that. But you can see but just to illustrate, the number of software products in Rocket in general, not just in the Coble space, but in general, that are available in the the Rocket in the, Visual Studio Code marketplace. And it just goes to show just how important we see that toolset for supporting development of a variety of languages and systems. So from our point of view, it's very likely that we will deliver innovation here first. Still supporting the major big classic IDEs, but you'll see innovation appear here first of all, including things like Visual Studio Code and dev containers that we, recently supported. But these tool sets, while they're important, they're kind of standard and critical for most development use cases. What you can't overlook is the scale of the COBOL applications that you are working on. And, you know, underestimate the scale of a COBOL application at your peril because it really determines and dictates so many things that you can do with it. And of course, the the need for quality documentation is is often called, out here in these systems. You know, when you're working with something between, on average, between one and maybe a 100,000,000 lines of code, having quality documentation is is pretty important. So here is a question for you. There's no, prize for this one, but we're certainly curious to know how well you believe your systems are documented. Or maybe you're you're a system integrator and you work with global systems regularly. How well would you describe the way that they are documented? You know? And here's a few answers for you, but you're welcome to come up with your own options here. You You know, would you say they're really well documented, partially documented, or are you one of those that believes in the fact that COBOL is a self documenting language? It doesn't need comments. Right? I'm not sure I would agree with that one entirety. Certainly, COBOL being English like helps with documentation purposes, but I think some, you know, some comments certainly help. So thanks for sharing your answers with us there. But I think what I would say, one of the, you know, the the needs that developers have around documentation is because what they're trying to do is change some code, aren't they? They want to understand how code operates today so that they can then move forward and make some changes to it and understand what might be impacted by that change. And this is not something you can rely on. I find you think you can really rely on, by just grepping source code and and piecing together the thread of of, of what will be impacted. This is something that really benefits greatly from tools to help the developer to do that. And for me, it's one of the the things that actually is lacking in most developers' toolkits is a tool like this to help them understand the impact of change. And so this is something I think that is can only become more and more important to your global developers in the future, especially, you know, with the continued reliance on those systems and the scale of them. You know, if you want to be able to move quickly, you need a lot more certainty about the change you're going to make and the impact it's gonna have on the rest of the application. And, of course, things like GenAI, you know, are really helping in that area. They're helping to document systems, and improve that documentation in in ways that we've not had available to us before. And so, actually, that's something that we wanna share with you now. I'm gonna bring Jen back on stage, and she's gonna show you what we've been up to in this area. Hi, Jen. Welcome back. Hello. Thank you very much. I see we've got the the GenAI. We've been having some fun with that internally. So yeah. First off, before we jump into the demo, I thought it was maybe good to just talk about where GenAI really fits into the conversation about call development. It can be a little bit, maybe tempting to think, okay, great. We've got GenAI now. We can use it to completely rewrite our COBOL applications into something like Java, Python. That's not a very safe approach, primarily because the large language models, they just have not been trained on COBOL. This can lead to a lot of a lot of hallucinations, a lot of inaccuracies. And when you take into consideration just the scale of these global applications, you know, we're talking hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lines of code, that can be a a big mess, which is really not what you want for a mission critical application. So instead, the analysts recommend using Gen AI to work with the developer. So, helping productivity, maybe onboarding new talent, those kind of things as a like a working in tandem with the developer. So we're going to go to a demonstration now and see how we've been applying GenAI in our Rocket COBOL tools. In this demonstration, we're going to look at some of the generative AI features in Rocket Cobol that make onboarding and code development easier. These capabilities lower the barrier to entry for new developers by providing real time program summaries and code explanations instantly with just the click of a button. So usually if you're getting familiar with a new COBOL application you need to open the source code, read through the comments which can often be outdated or inaccurate. But we've taken a different approach. Let's start by generating a program summary before diving into the code itself. I'm going to take a program from our list here. We're going to go generate program summary. We can see here that the summary uses generative AI to explain the entire program in a natural language. It tells us what the program does at a high level and highlights any key details that a developer may need. Looking in a bit more detail towards the bottom, we have a couple of key attributes, for example, lines of code. We have the cyclomatic complexity of the program. So this can warn us about any potential red flags such as some deeply nested if statements which can be a great insight before you go making any changes. It shows a little bit about some dead statements as well. So we can see here we've got nearly 700 dead statements, all useful information before you start hacking away any bits of code. Scrolling down, we have copybooks in use. All of these are hyperlinks. So if you click any of them, then it will bring you direct to that copybook. For example, here, we've got the list of copybooks also displayed in a diagram form. We've got the program control flow diagram. I like to think of this as like a GPS for navigating COBOL paragraphs and sections. We even got a mock up of any screens found in the application so we can visualize what the user interface interface might look like. So with this, I have now got a solid understanding of what I'm working with without having to read through thousands of lines of code. Now let's switch to a different application and see how GenAI helps during development. So we now have on our screen a COBRA program in Versus Code. What we're going to do is we're going to click on this new explain button. We can see here that the AI gives a step by step explanation as to what the paragraph does with live hyperlinks so I can just jump to the related sections. The overview goes into detail about what the code does step by step with a summary towards the bottom. This can allow the developer to actually really get deep into the nitty gritty of the COBOL code itself and see exactly what is happening. Now we're going to click generate comment. We can see now that we have an AI generated comment. This can be really useful for when we want to help fill in some missing documentation and the beauty is if anything in this paragraph changes, this comment can be automatically regenerated to keep it always up to date. We can also explain smaller code sections. For example, let's take this snippet here. We're going to right click and go to explain active selection. So let's take a look at what it says. In this example, the snippet uses trigonometric functions to calculate the Earth's circumference so the AI has recognized this pattern before and explains it clearly. Finally, we have some error handling suggestions. So I'm going to get an error that I've previously generated. We have here this error, this red squiggly line. So let's get it to explain active selection once more. We can see here it's explaining this new snippet, and it's also giving us a suggestion as to what the error is and how we can fix the error. For example, we may have a missing period, or it may just be a simple typo. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm going to hand back over to myself for the main presentation. Yep. Thank you, Othergen. So, yeah, just wanted to round off and just explain a little bit about how that demonstration worked because I did mention just before that large language models haven't been trained on COBOL. So you might be thinking, well, how does that work? Well, we've taken our, in just you know, we've taken our COBOL expertise through our analysis software and through our documentation, then we feed that into the large language model. So then that can decipher the all of the foundational knowledge and the context and then provide it to to you. Alright. Thank you very much. I'm gonna hand back to Scott for a little glimpse into what we have planned for the future. Thanks, Jen. Jen will be with us, a little later, handling the q and a. So actually thinking about q and a, get your questions ready now in the q and a chat as you can see a few coming in. And thanks everyone for all your comments you've been posting as we were going through. Appreciate you joining in today. Just looking ahead and thinking about roadmap around, AI, just to share with you very quickly, So you'd be like many other vendors in this space, we've been adapting our roadmap to take advantage of what AI is offering. You've seen some big investments there around chatbots and code explaining functionality, and we're just keeping that, that, road map coming thick and fast, really. We just delivered some new updates for Copilot support in a recent update, and there's more coming. One area in particular, going back to Jen's GPS that she described it as, where you saw kind of the flow of program logic in different sections, what you'll notice is those section names are all as they were defined by the developer. Sometimes it might be nicer to see those, in a less cryptic form and actually to describe what they really do. And we've been experimenting ways with, describing those business labels using GenAI to help summarize them. Again, helping you having to stop looking at code really to find out what it does, but look at something a lot more human, readable. So lots coming there, including, you know, responsible use of AI by, taking adopting the ISO standard. You can expect, Rocket to do that across the board. Now if you want to find out more about our AI roadmap or you want to find out more about the Cobalt language in in a, innovation that we described earlier on today and what else we're doing in that area, the developer tool chain, what our thoughts there, We've pulled together, produced a ten year outlook on our plans for the road map ahead. And this is all designed to help you understand our direction of travel, understand what we think the art of the possible is for these applications so that you can make informed decisions about the future of your own applications. Now this is not written in stone in the sense that we can't adapt and change this this road map moving forward. So if you've got things that you want to see or additions, by all means, you know, definitely make us make that known. But, if you want a copy of the roadmap, you won't find it on the website, actually, but it's not that hard to get hold of. You either contact myself or Jen or Sarva or your account executive at Rocket Software, and they will provide access to that. And we'd love to have a conversation about your thoughts on what's in, our future roadmap. But without further ado, let me hand things back to Saba at this point who's going to take us through the closing stages of today's session. Hi, Safa. Welcome back. Thank you, Scott, and thank you for thank you and Jen for such an amazing session today. So to oh, sorry. To wrap things up, we would like to share some five takeaways from today's webinar. As we mentioned, the number one challenge with Cobble is perception of it of and, you know, you are dedicating sometime in 12/02/2025 to learn more about Cobel and Cobel organization. So we encourage you as Cobel ambassadors to kinda share what you learn, what you know about Cobel with your colleagues and management, and maybe then step by step, we're gonna change this perception and we're gonna see the world when Cobble is actually deserve, like, get the attention it deserves and get the achievement that it provides to your mission critical business application. So here are five takeaways. The first one is Rocket Cobble is a growth engine. It isn't fading. It's growing. It's changing platforms throughout the decades, and we see how it continues to support mission critical systems in all the different industries from travel, insurance, finance, to government, and beyond. The second one is that the only thing that I did about Cobble is perception. Actually, Cobble is very powerful programming language, and it drives business value right now today, and you can extend this business value with a lot of platforms, integration, and deployment. So make sure that you and your teams understand, like, the true scope of Cobalt capabilities. The next one is Gen AI plus today's development tools are leading to powerful onboarding accelerated. So skill shortage is not just words for the Cobalt business, retiring specialists, lack of documentation. It's a real challenges that we are facing every single day, and we see how GenAI is actually reshaping this situation and helping us to help any developer with any Cobo experience navigate and analyze Cobo applications of any size and complexity. So this is a powerful tool we encourage you to try, and this is something we want you to take with you after today's session. The next one is will your modernization path deliver choice today and tomorrow? So, again, we see how platforms and IT landscape is changing drastically every single year, every single couple of years, and we see how Cobo at its core is very adaptive to those changes. So we are seeing and we are sure that COBOL will continue this adaptability in the future. And last but not least is Rocket is building COBOL roadmap. We encourage you to reach out to us, get the copy of it, and share your feedback. It's a dynamic document. We see how everything is changing all the time, so we want to reflect that in a road map. And at the same time, looking back ten years back, we see so many technologies like cloud and containers and visit v virtual machines and everything, and how Cobble successfully actually adopted all of those. So we are sure that Cobble will continue to thrive in the next decade. And this is this road map is kinda our commitment to COBOL and COBOL modernization. So once again, please feel free to reach out. We will we will be happy to share it with you. So that's pretty much it for today. The, the only two things that left are quiz and the q and a. So if you have any questions for Scott or Jen, please use q and a tab. We see a few questions, but, yeah, feel free to send those. And we will continue with the quiz. So today's quiz is based on today's content. So you will have five questions, and please use the chat to answer those. Each each answer will be numbered, so just send the number. It will be easier for everybody. And then check the visual Cobble form tomorrow. We will announce the winners there, and we will reach out to the winners with the gift details next week. So since it's holiday season, we're gonna have 10 winners this time. It's it's a new thing because usually we have five, but we decided that since it's December, we need to shake things up. So if everybody is ready, let's start with the first question. And the first question is when was the cobble invented? Was it in 1966? Was it 1959, 1971, or 1968? So someone someone answered 12. So we see a lot of answers. We're gonna dedicate, like, ten, twenty seconds for each question. Let me set up the timer so we are on time today, and we can continue after the webinar. So three, two, one, and the right answer is 1959. So it turned 66 this year, 67 next year, and still thriving and still relevant, which is amazing. So the next question is, how many transactions per second are sent under running? So not per second, just transactions sent under running due to their infrastructure modernization. So we have 3,000 per second, 3,000 per minute, 30,000 per second, and 30,000 per minute. This is something Scott shared with us. So I see a lot of a lot of answers. Let's wait three, two, one. And the correct answer is number three, thirty thousand transactions per second, which is nothing but impressive. The next question is what Rocket Cobble Gen AI feature helps you to understand the Cobble program before you edit it and help you to understand, like, the whole scope? Is it program AI docs, so we'll summary rocket explainer or program summary? Still see a lot of answers. Three, two, one, and the correct answer is program summary. And this is something that Jen showed us during the demo. Actually, I'm surprised so many rocket explainer, which was, like, which was a trap, honestly. We were hoping to see those results. Two more questions. The question number four is what popular development tool set you can see on the picture on the screenshot here? If you have a really good eyesight, you can see the icon of this tool set, which is kinda hint. But is it Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, Twilight, or IDX Cobble? We have answers coming up. Three, two, one, and the correct answer is it's Visual Studio Code, one of the most popular toolset in today's development world. And then the last question for today is what's coming next to Rocket Cobo and GenAI Insights with a g, not j? Is it Copilot integration? Is it business rule generation, smart search, or all the above? So we have the answers. And then three, two, one, the correct answers is all the above. As Scott mentioned, we're gonna release patch updates and not wait for the last the next big update to enhance Gen AI capabilities. So we will keep you posted, and we will share updates when there are. So thank you so much for participating in the quiz. We're gonna share the results. We're gonna share the presentation and webinar recording with you on our customer artificial Cobble community. We just updated the community. We upgraded the design and workflow and everything. So I encourage you to check it out and join it to learn more about Cobble and share your feedback, share your experience with other Cobble specialists. Right now, we will continue with the q and a. And as I mentioned before, there's gonna be a short post event service, so please fill it in and help us to make the sessions even more valuable to you. We will truly, truly appreciate it. So, Hi. Scott, Jen, hi. Hi. How's it going? So I suggest we will start with the first question. I think it's the question for Jen since she was the one who was showing us Gen AI capabilities. Is there a limit to the size of a program, For example, maximum number of lines in order to generate the summary and visualizations. So what the tool does is it actually works with our enterprise analyzer or COBOL analyzer product. So, you know, it works with that to provide the knowledge base, and then it feeds into the, like, the Versus code. So, essentially, there is if it can fit into one of those products, then you'll be able to use it for the Gen AI stuff. That's great. Thank you so much, Jen. The next question is also about GenAI, but I think it's for Scott. So any plans to offer GenAI capabilities for the other Cobol products, like IQ Cobol product line and then RM Cobol? I what I could say is I don't wanna make any, false promises here and but, yes, things are being evaluated in generally through the analyzer capabilities that Jen mentioned there. That's where, actually, a lot of the, gen AI capabilities are rooted, by because it has a really detailed knowledge of the application. And that context can then be provided to a GenAI large language model so that it doesn't have to try and figure out how your application works because actually they're not that great at doing that at the scale of your applications. So, really, the the secret is can we get your application loaded into, analyzer? And if we can do that, then we can start taking advantage of some of the Gen AI. So all I can say is watch this space, but certainly, yes, we're talking about it. And I can see, Salvo, I know just before you ask me another question, there's quite a few there's a few in here I can see that are to two with maybe product enhancements or tickets and things like that. And they will probably take a while to answer, so, and use up more time than we've got left. So I know what we could say is that every single question that has been asked asked here today, we will absolutely reply to them either on the for forum or directly to you with more information about your breast. But we're probably not going to get to all of them today. But I did see did. see one there about ARM, right, to ask. Well, maybe that's probably a good one for Jen as well. She was talking about ARM. Yes. Yes. I see it all about, when Arm will be, you know, available in the products. And the good news is, well, now. With the release of the most recent release, then we have now got Arm for, Red Hat Linux and for Amazon Linux, I believe. So, yes, the good news is it's already there. And maybe, Scott, we have one more minute for the last question for today. So there is a question basically outlining whether can Rocket Coble run mainframe Coble application as well? Because as you mentioned, we were focusing on distributed platforms today. So is there a way to kinda leverage all the great things we discussed today on mainframe applications? I get the answer in short is yes. But it's more than just that Rocket Cobalt capability. Rocket Cobalt is, you know, at the heart of many of our Cobalt modernization solutions, whether the application is on z or off z. But if we are specifically talking about z based applications, then other things come into the equation like CICS or CICS or six depending on where you are in the world, and p l one, VSAM, JCL, and IMS, and and many other things that need to be considered as well. And so we have dedicated solutions to help with all of those mainframe subsystems. And within that solution, of course, is Rocket Coble. So the the standard answer is yes, but there's a bigger conversation to be had about how you modernize mainframe applications and and how you leverage those if you want to repack from them on distributed systems. Get in touch if you want to find more about that, know more about that. We'd be happy to tell you the the the fuller detail. Thanks, Scott. So as Scott mentioned, we're gonna address every single question that you asked personally via email or on forum. So please, we're gonna stay in touch. And, yeah, thanks everyone. Scott, Jen, thank you so much for today's session. Thanks everyone who joined us. We wish you happy holidays, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Saba. Happy holidays, Thank you. everyone. Take care.