Name: COBOL x GenAI Insights: Meet Rocket® Visual COBOL® 11.0
Uploaded: 2025-09-17T15:30:05.749Z
Duration: 1 h 3 min 52 s
Description: COBOL x GenAI Insights: Meet Rocket® Visual COBOL® 11.0

Transcript for "COBOL x GenAI Insights: Meet Rocket® Visual COBOL® 11.0": Hello. Hello. Hello, everyone. We are very happy to welcome everyone on today's session. Could you please drop in a chat if you can hear and see me? And if everything is okay with the video and sound, it would be really, really helpful. K. Nice. Thanks much for confirming everything. We will start shortly in a couple of minutes, and we'll give some more time for everyone to join us. And feel free to drop in a chat where are you joining from. I'm joining today from Lithuania in Europe, so so it would be really nice to learn where are you joining from. Canada. Sounds amazing. Illinois, India. Oh, I bet it's not I bet it's great for you. Thanks so much for joining. Belgium, California, so many people. It's gonna be a really global event today. Thank you everyone for joining us. Oxford, Germany, Florida, Brazil. So so many, many places. Nice. Spain, India. Oh my gosh. We really are covering the whole planet today. So, yeah, couple one more minute probably, and we will start shortly. I think there was a question about the link. I think you can forward your link to your mobile device and maybe try to join via phone. It should be working just fine as from the desk. But please let us know if you have any troubles. We will try to help you as well. France, Lille. I've been to Lille. It's very, very nice city. Great. So I think we can start. Let me check for one second. I think okay. It's been two minutes, and I think we are all set to start. And while people are still joining, I will dedicate some time for housekeeping. Hi, everyone again. It's really nice to see so many people from all the different places and countries joining us today. It's gonna be a really exciting session today, and I would like to dedicate some time for housekeeping just to make sure that everybody has flawless experience today. So first things first, we will be recording today's session, and we will distribute it tomorrow via forum that I will cover a little bit later and via email that you used for registration. The second thing I want to cover is that we would like the session to be as interactive as possible, and thank you so much for keeping the chat so active so far. We will disable chat for the main part of the event, and we encourage you to use q and a tab that you can see in your interface for all the questions to our speakers. So if you have a question, go to q and a tab and type in everything that you have, and we will answer them during the event and then in the end. And last but not least, we will have a short post event survey after the webinar. It's gonna be, like, five sick questions just to make sure we have your feedback. And next time we have event like that, we take in mind the feedback that you have, all your comments, and all of your suggestions. So feel free to share your feedback, and it will take, like, a couple of minutes of your time. And another exciting thing I want to share with you today is all the great things and updates are coming for our customer community, also known as Rocket Visual Cobalt Forum. It's a great place. We have more than 250 people at the moment, COBOL enthusiasts and specialists, asking questions, sharing experiences, and discussing everything regarding COBOL. So I encourage you joining today because we're gonna share webinar materials there tomorrow and later this week. And at the same time, I just want to mention that we're gonna introduce new platform, new mechanics, and completely new design to the forum in upcoming weeks. So this is an exciting release that we are wanted to keep know you you know about it, and we will share all the updates very, very soon. And then on that note, I would like to introduce Scott Nielsen, vice president of product management. He and his team are behind Rocket Visual COBOL and all the exciting things we're gonna cover today. Hi, Scott. Hey, Salva. Thanks so much. Just check. My audio is coming through loud and clear. All good? Yes. Everything's perfect. Brilliant. Thank you. Salva, hello, everyone. Thanks again for joining our eleven zero broadcast today. My name is Scott Nielsen. I head up the product management organization here at Rocket Software for our COBOL and Enterprise Suite product lines. I'm gonna be taking you through most of the highlights of the new innovation in this release today. And then, Saba will be joining us a little later at the end of the session because as you can see here, he's got a quiz and some prizes and some giveaways, organized today, as a kind of a thank you for those of you who've been able to join the the live session. And there's so many of you as well, so I really thank you for that. I did yeah. It's not free, those prizes, by the way. There are some questions you have to answer, and I did get a quick sneak peek at those before the session. And I can tell you that the answers to those are going to appear in the content that we're presenting to you today. So keep an eye out. So let's get started. Plenty to, get stuck into, but maybe just one thing about the target audience for today for today's session. If you're coming in here today and you've got interests around particularly around IBM z modernization needs, stay put stay tuned into this webinar, because certainly everything that we're talking today is applicable. But we will also signpost a sister, solution around enterprise suite, which is far more encompassing of the needs when it when it comes to IBMC optimization. I won't tell you where to access that a little later today. But for now, let's proceed further with the content today. Just wanna introduce you to the team behind the event today, the product management and product marketing team. Some familiar faces there, maybe some new ones to you. You'll hear from couple of those new faces later on today. Main thing I want to highlight, though, again, is just reinforce. Please do ask questions in the chat as we go. I think we've got someone here to pretty much answer any question you may throw at us. At least we'll do our best. So send those questions as we go through so we got a good bank of those when we get to the q and a portion. Now just to kinda kick us off, we thought we would, set the scene with some sharing some stats and numbers with you about the release here. And I've left the topics, so you can see what we're gonna be covering. And let's see if, your estimate or your number matches the one that I'm going to reveal on each one of these topics. And we'll start with the engineering team, the core engineering team that we have for our Cobalt and, modernization solutions. How many engineers there? Well, actually, it's over 200 engineers working on our Cobalt modernization tools, and they're part of a 2,000 strong engineering workforce here at Rocket. And many of those engineers are actually working on road map to connect Rocket products with the global solutions we're talking about today. And we also just recently launched a new version of a next XGen campaign, probably a bit like yourselves in many of your organizations. You bring in new talent and new blood to support the future of your applications. Of course, we're doing exactly the same here. It's our commitment to you. And we had another 16 join us just last week. And some of whom are going to be going into our 40 plus strong support organization. So stat that's not on this slide, I can tell you about, the average tenure of our, level two, level three support engineers is over twenty years. What that really means is they had tremendous breadth and knowledge of the products. Now how many change requests in this release? I tell you why I was staggered by this. I had to go back and check it. There's over two and a half thousand change requests in our combined COBOL and Enterprise Suite, release, 11 release. Of course, we're just scratching the surface here today. I'm just gonna talk about the the big new innovations, but I will signpost where you can find out more information about, what else is here in 11 a little later. And what about the platforms that we've tested in this release? Let's work this out together, shall we? We've got Windows. We've got some Linux distributions that's mounting increasing. We've got some Unix distributions. So how many there would you say? Five, ten, 15? Well, you need to multiply that number by 10 to get to what we've tested in this release. Because if you think about it for just Windows alone, there's multiple editions of that desktop and server. There's different versions within that that you might be using. And then just extrapolate into the many and varied Linux distributions we have, as well as Unix systems we still support. Then start thinking about 32, 64 bit, Java, dot net, containerization, cloud, etcetera, etcetera. It all amasses a very big testing responsibility. And we do see it that way. It is a responsibility. We take it very seriously because you could be deploying your application in any thread of that enterprise IT landscape. In fact, we encourage you to, but we wanna be in a good position to support you if you pick up the phone and ask for any assistance. And ensuring that we get continuity so that you can have assurances when moving from one version of our software to another, we've amassed in the time that we've been in business more than a million automated test cases that provide that continuity from release to release. It's also important to you because it provides continuity and assurances that you get the same application behavior if you choose to change the underlying infrastructure, which you will certainly do so from time to time. So just a few stats to whet your appetite today. We're gonna get be going into the innovation in in a moment, but let me tell you about some news. I'll it may be news to you, but it's something that occurred, back in early, 2024, just in case you weren't aware. But the business that, we're talking to you about today, Cobalt, as well as enterprise, connectivity, Changeman, and Korber. These were all former Micro Focus branded products. They were acquired by Rocket Software Software, early in 2024. And, if you don't know Rocket Software, they're just actually celebrated this year thirty five years very much in the related business of your applications. That is their focus. It's great for us to be part of an organization that shares the same kind of passions and approach that we do. Now, we've been very busy, the integration. If you've ever been through that approach, you know, that situation yourself, you know, there's a lot of work to do to integrate systems, but that is all in the rear view mirror for us now. And one of the outcomes you can expect if you install the software of this release is that the exterior of the product, you know, that is going to have all the rocket reflected branding and delivery that you would expect. You know? But what's much more important than the exterior is what is inside. And I just want to assure you that everything that you have been familiar with before using our products, all of that technology in its entirety is here in Rocket inside of the products that we're discussing today. Now, the brand the branding and the integration is all in the rear view mirror, as I said. Very busy time for us, but even throughout that, our engineers were relentlessly focused on delivering you new innovation, which I promise I will get to you, revealing that very shortly. But just before we leave this story about rockets, I do wanna come to this kind of this slogan that you will see, for Rocket Software if you visit our website. But, really, it's much more than a slogan. For us, it really acts as a North Star and really talks to our philosophy of what we're trying to do for you. And for us here in the Cobalt business, as much as it is about innovating in Cobalt, it really is about the applications, your applications that our Cobalt products serve. And, of course, the applications that we're talking about today are mission critical systems that are running your businesses. The last thing you need is any kind of disruption around those. So our focus, and I hope it's borne out as you see today, it's always about trying to connect your applications to new innovation in IT quickly, safely without any of that disruption that you might see in other approaches. Okay. So hopefully you see that in all interactions with, with Rocket, not least of which is our major software releases. Now I did mention Rocket Cobalt before. It's gonna take you maybe some of you have been with us as well. It might take a while to learn that name. You'll be probably much more used to talking about Micro Focus Cobalt. But just to, again, rest assured, Rocket Cobalt really is just the new name for all of that heritage, all of that DNA that was in Micro Focus Cobalt before. That is now here, just with a different name on the tin, if you like. And we've been, sharing that story with customers this year on a a bit of a roadshow and tour throughout Europe and further afield visiting several countries. It's been fantastic, telling you about our plans, but much more importantly, hearing about yours. And we've had some fantastic speakers sharing their stories of modernization, really aspiring for for many organize inspiring for everyone listening to that. So if you attended, thank you. If you presented, sincerely, thank you. It was very fantastic to see all of that and hear it all. If if you haven't visited one, well, there's plenty in the upcoming future, including in early October. If you're in The UK, if you're near London, please come along and see us there. And I think Saba's putting a link. I can see in the chat now. Please come along and see us. Maybe a bit far from Canada as I saw there. But if you're in The UK, please come along. And, otherwise, connect to your account executive to find out when we're gonna be in your neighborhood. And if we're not, ask us why not, you know, and and, we'd love to come and see you. Okay. So without further ado, let us get on to the topic of, today's session. We're gonna look at really the main highlights of this release with you today. But importantly, as a backdrop to that, I just wanna share with you our thinking and our approach when it comes to the roadmap and what modernization means for us. And we always really look at it through these three lenses or these three pillars and align our roadmap through these areas. And it starts with infrastructure, which is all about giving you the choice and flexibility to run your applications wherever you really want to do so, whether it's containers to cloud. And then we're looking at how you can innovate within the application itself. And that may be taking advantage of new IT, architectures, maybe API enabling your application, or even running Cobalt directly inside the Java Virtual Machine. And the last theme or filler for us is around development modernization, which is really about helping you accelerate software and deliver it faster. It's about getting the changes from the fingertips of your developers into the hands of your end users, your customers as rapidly as possible. And for some of our customers, that's a monthly, it's a weekly, it's an overnight, in fact, objective to do that faster and faster. Okay. So that's the kind of the backdrop to every release. Let's kinda look at what we've done in 11/00 to try and push the needle in all of these areas. And first place I want to start with you today is around infrastructure change. And I wanna ask you a question about, you know, what was the origin of your application? What platform did it begin life on? Was it on the far left there? Was it some sort of mainframe system, a host, mid range system of some kind, or was it on a UNIX system? That's where it began life. I mean, for many of you, you may not have been in the business back then when the application was first created, so you may not know. But I'm pretty certain it's been through several infrastructure change journeys since its inception. And what we're seeing now, in our cross sell customer base is very clearly that the predominant prevailing platform of choice for our customers is certainly x 86. That's not to say there still isn't a very strong footprint in UNIX, but clearly AIX market, and we continue to support that, but more and more organizations headed towards standardizing on commodity platforms. And as we look ahead into the cloud, you know, what we're here to do is help you connect those applications to cloud optimized services like, cloud databases, for example. And then further out, we're looking to help you refactor applications and do more than that. And more to come on that another time, but let's stay focused with infrastructure modernization for a moment because there is a new kid on the block there, a new processor, ARM processors, which we are delighted to announce. We will be supporting as part of the 11/00 release. You'll be able to run ARM workloads COBOL workloads on ARM. Now ARM has, for me, actually, has been on horizon for quite some time, and it never really seemed to get get closer to us for various reasons. But now that's starting to change, and we're starting to see a shift. And the reason for that actually is largely stemming from the cloud service providers themselves. If you think about the CSPs and the hyperscalers, you know, they're running very densely packed data centers with x 86 compute, and it needs a lot of energy to power those things. They get hot as a result, and then you need energy to cool them down. And where Arm sets itself out as being different there is just its energy efficiency, substantially more efficient there. So if you're a cloud service provider, this is interesting. It's a way of, reducing your cost but improving your environmental position because less our energy to power those processes, consequently, they get less hot, and therefore, there's less cooling needed to to to cool the things down. Now either way, whatever the driver, the motivation, you know, for you, we are just delighted to be able to offer you also that path for your applications, particularly if you're deployed in the cloud. So you now have a choice, x 86 or ARM with your choice of deployment. And what you're probably very likely to see as it's already started is a lot of incentives from the cloud service providers to give you a lower cost compute option there around ARM. Now that is just part of a much wider infrastructure story. We've talked about it a couple of times now, all the platforms that we support. This is kind of a very, a snapshot high level snapshot of the different things that we're supporting in this release. But there's a lot more detail there, including a lot more around the versions that are supported. And I've got a link to that for the directly to the product documentation for you so you can go and check our level of support for your enterprise platforms. Okay. With that theme around infrastructure change out of the way, let's move on to perhaps the the big highlight of today's session and the main new innovation that we want to talk to you about today, which is on the topic of generative AI. And none of us can escape the impact of this on our daily lives, quite frankly, as well as right across the industry. But what is interesting is that it has been so rapidly adopted and so broadly adopted. We are now seeing the outcomes, and hearing organizations talk about the success here. And while there's certainly plenty potential and and certainly a lot of productivity to be gained, We are also seeing surveys and responses from organizations who are not necessarily getting the productivity that they expected for the investment. So it clearly you can't just throw generative AI at your team and expect them suddenly to get ten, twenty, 30% more productive as a result. There's a lot more involved than that. So let's just kinda separate hype from reality for a second, especially when it comes to the kind of applications that we are all talking about today. And I don't know if any of you have really come here today expecting a magic wand maybe for GenAI to convert your COBOL applications to Java or Python or something like that. I'd be surprised if you haven't talked about it maybe in your organizations, but the truth of the matter is these large language models are not yet set up to try to achieve that. And there's several reasons for it. And most, I think, the biggest one really is just the training data that goes into these, last language models. You know they need vast quantities of training data. And for programming, a lot of that comes from Python and Java, which is out there in the open source. While there is COBOL or Assembler or PL one and those kind of languages, it's certainly not to the same degree or depth. So these systems, they are just not as fluent. That leads to hallucinations, inaccuracies, and cogeneration. But the real challenge I think they face is scale. Right? We're not talking about converting a 100 or a thousand lines of code or 10,000 or even a 100,000 lines of code. The systems often run to many millions of lines of code, and that just is not feasible for these kind of use cases. Will Gen AI be able to convert COBOL to something else in the future? Probably. Probably, it will. It's just a question of in whose lifetime that will be achievable in, and we're not waiting for that outcome at all. We're looking to bring the benefits of Gen AI to you today as quickly as possible because we certainly believe in them. By the way, you don't just take my word for it, of course. If you happen to have, an industry analyst subscription available in your company, many of you do, Gartner, IDC, Forrester, something like that, go talk to them and go get their opinion on this like like we have as well, certainly. And I think you'll, you know, you'll hear some consistent advice from them. You have to be super careful about this. But what they will tell you is where Gen AI is making a difference, and it's making developers more productive, augmenting their workflows, providing in IDE documentation and code explain and assistance like that. That is making a difference. So keep that in mind when you see some of the features that I'm gonna show you in just a minute. But before we get, I just wanna lift the lid actually on our approach here because there are challenges around using Gen AI for our kind of application. So what are we doing at Rocket to overcome them? I'd just like to lift the lid a little bit and show you that, what we've been doing. And for us, the solution to this is not to rely on GenAI entirely for these kind of activities. What we are doing is blending an application wide understanding of your system and we with GenAI. And we get that understanding using our static code analysis products. They can pass your application and understand how it all relates and how it's connected together and all the dependencies. This is deterministic based analysis. These are effectively the facts of your application, and we give those facts to GenAI and ask it to explain them and use it for what it's really good at doing. And you can see here there's it's more than just that application wide context that we're giving it. There's many other things that we're doing here to produce a very highly engineered prompt customized for COBOL and customized around your application code base as well, the knowledge that we have around how it's constructed. So let me show you how this works and what we're now able to do as a result. I thought this is something I think is quite visual, so we thought we'd show you a few screenshots here to kinda bring it to life. I would start with where we began actually in the last release. When we got started in this area, we, introduced a chat assistant for developers into 10. This assistant was really there to help, new developers who may be unfamiliar with our products, and that just helps automate how they access them and use them. We've extended that now. That same chat interface is actually also available in the analyzer tool sets, making that easier to get started with. We've extended vocabulary, and we've also added more reports that you can kick off. Like, this one at the bottom, run the performance optimization report, which helps the developer understand how they could actually achieve better performance potentially in their code. But I think what gets really more exciting in this release, of course, is bringing Gen AI into play. And here's a screenshot that's sort of highlighting that for you. I think you've probably all got the situation in your companies where such and such Fred is retiring or something next year or maybe sooner, and you need to document the application. This is exactly what we've been asked to do by a number of customers, and here's something we think is gonna help. So here's a a screenshot of Visual Studio Code. There's a section of code. And if you can't see this, by the way, make sure you click the the enlarge button so you can see this full screen. But you can see this in Versus Code and a little pop up there for the developer to explain or document that. And what we've got on the right hand side is the explanation, an inserted comment that explains what that section of code is doing. I'm not gonna read out the code, that comment. Just trust me, it's pretty decent, I think. I'd be happy if I've written that as a developer. This is next next screenshot, we'll go a bit deeper, and this is something I just find fascinating every time I consider this one. Right? Because we're not looking at a section of code here. We're looking at one statement on the left, and you can see that's quite a complex one. There's a lot of trig math going on there. And, of course, the developer who wrote it didn't put a comment on the line above. I mean, we've all been there and probably we're all guilty of doing that too at one time or another, but not putting a comment in when we should. Doesn't matter. Right? We can ask large language model now to explain that to us. And what you're seeing on the right is the very detailed explanation that you can get about everything that's going on. And what I've extracted there is just the summary of that, and I will point out what that is doing because the large language model has recognized that that is actually the formula for calculating the distance between two points on the Earth's surface using the law of, spherical law of cosines, I think it is. And I find that's incredible that it can determine that from that code. Of course, it's not doing it by itself. It's all the other things that we're feeding into it to help it get to that answer. By the way, there's more to it than what I'm showing you here. If you make an error in the code, a compiler error, it's gonna try and help you fix that, work out what is wrong. So there's various other things at play here. Now I also want you to maybe take a moment to think about how you approach, maybe fixing a bug in in an application, maybe know roughly what program it's in and what's your approach there. If it's especially if it's unfamiliar territory. Right? The first thing you're gonna do is open the source file. You're gonna try and find some comments, read those, maybe. Maybe you've got a healthy dose of skepticism about that if you're an experienced developer because the code could be out of date. The comments could be out of date. But then you go and start looking at the code and try and piecing it together. Right? Well, actually, now you can start with from a point of much more understanding. Before you can open the code, you can produce a summary like this of that program. You get a Gen AI documented summary at the top. You get a list of all the connected artifacts that are associated with that program elsewhere in the application. You get these fantastic flow diagrams showing you the logic flow and relationships. And e and if there's a screen, we're even gonna kinda get a mock up of what that might look in the application. You can get all of that without having to dive into the code, first of all. Of course, it's up to date. That documentation is actually up to date with the facts of what's in that code, not an outdated comment. Now one last screenshot I'd just like to show you here before we kinda move on. This one is in the actually in the area of analyzer, COBOL analyzer. You know, it's our toolset for providing this understanding to the LLMs. And I don't know why it is, but we as developers often have a habit of abbreviating names in programs, and you can see an example of this here, some abbreviated section names. But we can use the LLM to improve those. And on the right, you can see examples of what they really should look like, overdrief overdraft fee calculation, car pin authentication, that sort of thing. Right? Now this is conceptual, what I'm showing you here. Let me show you what it looks like really in the product. Is analyzer, and what we're looking at is a program flow chart in analyzer. And you can see those new names represented here, bank user authentication service. But there's some of the bit more cryptic ones just so you know what they used to look like. And if you're a solution architect, you know, and you're trying to get a good sense of how the application is working, you know, this means you can actually really go a long way with that before you really need to dive and unlock it in code. So let me kind of summarize what we've been doing there. The approach we're taking is not just to throw your applications into the LLM and hope for the best. Right? We are giving the LLM a lot of added context about the code. So we're bringing the best of both here, really. Deterministic knowledge, facts of your application, and asking generative AI to explain them. We're bringing our domain knowledge, our Cobo domain knowledge. We are Cobo experts after all. We're bringing that into the equation. And something I haven't touched on already, but it's about model flexibility. We know many of you will be happy to use cloud based LLMs. Others, you will need to use on prem LLMs. And in fact, in future, you'll start to see the emergence of domain specific small language models, and we want you to have this choice. So we build that in from the ground up. You can configure whichever one you really want to use wherever it might be on prem or the cloud. And what this is all about doing is delivering a a faster, safer modernization for you, whether you're a a developer, you know, fixing a bug and you're familiar with the code base, or you're a brand new developer, you know, coming in to learn Cobo and maybe learn about your application. There's so much there now to reinforce and and help you, you know, be successful with that application. I'll just quickly give you a glimpse at our roadmap around AI that's up and coming. You can see where we've got to in this 11/00 release. Plenty more coming down the line, and not all of it is waiting for next major release. So you should expect to see this nice run rate or what we call a fast follow-up to 11 where we bring in more capabilities. But underpinning all of this, you know, is, our approach to using AI safely for you. And we all heard about the fears and concerns about using AI, and the industry has come up with, you know, a standard, approach for this, which is this ISO forty two zero zero one is all about producing a an artificial intelligence management system, which enables an organization to capture risks, track risks in their software so that we're always doing the right thing by you. And we've done that for ISO twenty seven zero zero one as well. This is really the advance of that for, AI. Now we talked about road map there. Let me signpost to you at this point some more information about the road map, because we've spent some time here putting together what we see as a ten year outlook on our product strategy and road map for you. And it covers all manner of things from AI to Cobol language innovation, the developer tool tool chain, and more besides. And the purpose really here is just to give you a lot more visibility into what's in our thinking and what is in our plans ahead. Of course, it allows you also to engage in a discussion with us about it if it's not meeting your needs. But where our hope is here that it helps you plan your own application strategies much more clearly. Now this is quite, a a reasonable, few sit sets of, a four here, paper for you to review. We're not putting that on the website as you might, expect, but you can easily access that. You just need to send a request to anyone on today's session, including myself or your account manager. They'll provide access to this and, you know, and also start a conversation with you about your needs around that. So please do get in touch with us. I really hope that's really helpful information for you. Now right at the bottom there, you'll see product life cycle mentioned. That's also covered in the Visual Cobalt roadmap there. But let's talk about that in more detail now because it's a great time to plan your upgrade with this release or at least think about the upgrade process. This visual here shows that we've been doing a release of the product as you can pretty much count on every year, a major new release. That comes with several years of committed engineering support. But as you can see here, with the release of 11, version seven enters into extended support. If you are using version seven or earlier, I would suggest with some urgency, please get in touch with your account manager, to talk about that, to make sure you've got the right support coverage in place for the version you're using until you upgrade. If you're on a later version, great. But, again, start planning your upgrade process. We know it can take time, so please start putting that, you know, into your planning and thinking. And if you've got any questions about that at all, about our approach and support and timelines, absolutely get in touch with us, and we'll be happy to talk in more detail with you about it. Now a few other links just to share with you. We've only scratched the surface today of what's new in 11. But here, this document will tell you all about the other new features that we haven't got time to discuss today. So you've got a link directly to that. Please take a check it out. And I'd also like to just promote the Visual Studio Code extensions that Rocket has in the marketplace Visual Studio Code marketplace. You can see they've all been rebranded. They've all got their little retro, Rocket logo there. And you can see our Rocket Cobalt extension there, that I think 15,000 downloads or something like that there and growing. Please make sure you've got that version now. No. You're not using the older one. And Paula Willis and her development team, I continue, they are actually delivering new drops of that, features quite regularly, not only in the major releases, but in between as well. So if you're not using Visual Studio Code extension, please go check it out. There's some great functionality that the team are delivering now for global development. Okay. With that, I think it's my turn now to hand over back to you, Saba, to come and take us through the remaining slides. Saba, just to say, I can't hear you. What about now? Can you hear me now? Yes. Yes. Loud and loud loud and clear. Perfect. Thank you so much, and thank you for sharing all the great things we have in Rocket Visual Cobol 11. So on that note, I want to share, more of the resources for you and your team to excel at Cobble. And the first resource is learn Cobble in one day. It's a perfect introduction course to get to know with Cobble and get familiar with the basics of the programming language. And so if you have new specialists joining your team or if you know to share your experience and learnings with other other teams, feel free to join this course. It's completely free, and we have thousands and thousands of people of completing this. So yeah. We will share the webinar deck in the forum and so you can get access to the learn combo in one day of course. In the beginning of today's session, Scott mentioned that we have a sister product to Rocket to Visual Cobble, and this product is aiming for IBM z application modernization. So if you have an application on the mainframe, we have an enterprise suite element that we're releasing this week as well. And you can watch the recording, and you can see all the great new capabilities that we are introducing with this release. So, again, you can find the link in the deck, and we'll share the deck tomorrow. So I encourage you to check it out if you have IMZ environment. And to sum up today's session, I will just I want to share five main takeaways of today's webinar, and it's gonna be end of the official part of today's. So the first one is Rocket equals Cobble. Actually, Rocket Visual Cobble is the most deployed modernization solution for Cobble for distributed Cobble applications, and we don't take it for granted. So Rocket software team is making sure that you're operating with the best in class toolset every single day, and we continue to do so. So we are we are very serious about bringing innovation to Rocket Visual Combo. The second thing is trusted application insights. So as you could see, by combining GenAI insights and static code analysis, we are delivering trusted insights into your COBOL applications. And though GenAI is not really suitable for rewriting global applications in Java or c sharp, we are still seeing it as a powerful tool for equipping your developers and making sure that you deliver new business value faster than ever. So this is gonna be the second takeaway. The third takeaway is Coble and Arm. So if you want to take your workload on Arm, our newly supported platforms with this release and cutting your operational cost while also providing environment friendly solution, feel free to reach out, and we will be happy to consult and assist you with this, deployment. The fourth thing is clear road map and ongoing dialogue. So as Scott mentioned is we are publishing the most detailed road map for this product, and we encourage you to reach out to your account executives and find out more about the road map and our vision for the next of Cobol and Cobble modernization solutions. And one more thing here, I want to ask you. So if you read the road map, please feel free to share your feedback with us because as any road map is a living and breathing document that we hope to update on a regular basis, so it would be really, really helpful to get the feedback from industry leaders like you are. So if you read the road map, let us know what you think, and let us know if there are other trends or themes that we want us to cover. And last but not least, actually, 2025 is the fifteen years anniversary of Rocket Visual Cobble. Fifteen years ago, we introduced Rocket Visual as a replacement for Net Express and Server Express solutions. And, of course, today, we are covering all the new things in 11, but I want to highlight that Rocket Visual Cobble reflects and represents fifteen years of innovation and decades of our expertise. So we hope that you are very happy and proud with this product as we are, and we are just want to make sure that it's not pause or stop or anything. It's just the beginning, and we will keep you posted on all the great things we have for you for the future. So that's pretty much it. And to give you some more fun after such serious part of that webinar, I would like to introduce you and welcome you to the quiz. So we will have five questions based on today's webinar content, and the ones who will answer those quick and correct will win prizes for our software. So please use chat to answer the questions. All the questions will be numbered from one to five, so just send send the number in the chat. We will calculate all the results after the webinar, and we will share the winners in the forum tomorrow. And, of course, as Scott mentioned in chat, we will have a live q and a after the quiz. So can you access the chat now? Because it was disabled for the main part. Could you please send, something to the chat just to confirm that you can use it? Okay. Great. I see that. Looks good. They're all ready and raring to go. Good good to hear. So the first question oh, sorry. One more thing. You will have thirty seconds to answer us because we are out of time today. So just to make sure that we have enough time for everything, thirty seconds for each question. So the first question is, how many years has Rocket Software been in business? Six, thirty five, twenty two, or seventeen? Let us know in in the chat. I see a lot of question and a lot of answers coming in. A lot of correct answers to me. So So but I see there's a couple of there's a couple of rocketeers participating in this. I think we do have to mention to them that they won't be included in the prizes. Sorry, Akash. So three, two, one, and correct answer is thirty five. Actually, here we celebrated this anniversary, and it was a really exciting event for the whole company. I think we even had banner on the Times Square, which was, like, super, super cool. Are you ready for the second question? The second question is, what is the new platform that we added in this release in Rocket Visual COVID 11? Is it LAG? Is it Windows? Is it Arm? Or is it Rocket Linux? Someone is sending couple of answers. Let's wait couple couple more seconds. And then so the right answer is Arm, and we are very excited about this new newly added platform. Are you ready for the third question? How many platforms combinations do we support? It's something that Scott mentioned at the very beginning. So we have five, twenty five, 50, or 115. So if you remember, Scott was showing this, like, really nice metrics with all the Rocket in numbers, and it was one of the numbers. Someone someone answering five. Not really believing in our capabilities. But the correct answer is 150, and we continue to expand this list. So let's see what we're preparing for you next time. Are you ready for the question number four? So what can you do with Gen AI insights? Get context for any code snippet or function, find that and duplicate a code for the chat interface, or summarize a couple program, or maybe all the above and all the things listed. Scott, I'm very happy to see I I didn't have any, like, concerns, but people were listening. That would be great. That would be great. I'm delighted. Lots and lots of right answers there. So the correct answer for this question is number four, all all the above. And final question, final chance to win Rocket Software is by combining GenAI with blank, you get the most trusted insights into your mission critical qualifications. What is the blank? Is it Rocket software team? Is it weekly horoscope? Is it static code analysis? Or is it competitor analysis? So let's wait a couple more seconds, and that's it for today, Chris. Thank you so much for all your engagement and for taking part in that. It looks really exciting, that you are so active. Thank you so much. So one more thing from my side before we proceed with the q and a. Once again, I want to mention that we have customer Rocket Visual Cobble community, and you can stay up to date with the latest Visual Coble news, learn best practices, share your experience, or ask questions, and get your, insights and everything around Coble and Coble modernization. Also, tomorrow, we will share webinar deck, webinar recording, and also five winners of the quiz on the forum. So, again, feel free to join us, and we are very happy to see you there. On that note, Scott, I introducing you to answer some questions. Thank you. And, yeah, it's time for the live join section. And, thankfully, there's other people joining us, me here to help with lots of questions that have come in. So thank you for posting those while we've been talking today. We've got Gary Evans joining us, part of our product management team, and also Jennifer Osborne joining us. And Jen, it may be a new face to you. This is a first, product major product launch as part of product management team. So, Jen, welcome aboard. First product launch for you, but not for the first time in Cobalt. Right? Yes. Exactly. I actually joined the company through a NextGen program, a couple years ago now. And I've been in our sales engineering, team for a couple years working with our customers and, really enjoyed that. And I am now in the product management team. So, yeah, very happy to be here. Brilliant. Thanks. Thanks so much. And, Gary, you're there as well. Hopefully, you can hear us, and then we'll be having a quick chat with you in a moment. How are the questions looking, Jen, in the chat? Where where should we begin? Yes. So we've got a lot of questions. You've been such a great interactive audience. I've answered a couple of them in the chat, so, you know, feel free to just have a look in there if you want any information. But I've kept a couple back, that I thought we could talk about here. A lot of people are very excited about this AI, this Gen AI, part. So I have a couple of questions. One is and I might, throw this to Gary, actually. So we've got a couple of questions about, the relationships using the Gen AI stuff. So first off, you know, how does the GenAI determine the relationship? So is it does it look at call statements? Does it look at something a little bit more nuanced? And as a part of that, does it also take into consideration sections or is it primarily just paragraphs? Thanks, Jen, for the question. So, I think Scott did mention some of this earlier and and the way that we are combining deterministic or the facts as as I think as Scott referred to them, and then using that data and and setting the context within the rag that we would use to ask the questions or pass the questions to the LLM. So all of the the relationship elements between the the sections, the copybooks, and all of those things are in that deterministic. They are the facts, the relationships. So if you if you're familiar with either COBOL analysis or enterprise analyzer, those the when the the code is passed, then it builds, a matrix of all of those relationships and then can use that data to pass to the LLM, which then will extrapolate that and give you a response. So the I think the short answer is yes. That that's catered for using the the combination of those two technologies. Gary, just sort of staying with that one for a second. I think you're also some of the questions just relate to the analysis capabilities. Is it actually able to determine these relationships? I mean, Gemma's talking about sections and the kind of the copy books and the depth it can actually get to. So maybe you could just help folks understand its capability understanding COBOL. I mean, obviously, you know, if you're if you're familiar with the products, they've they've been around these products have been around for for a long, long time and and particularly with the COBOL language, they have a very deep knowledge of understanding all the relationships. So, you know, whether nested copybooks or whether there's dependent sections, all of that information is understood and built into that. There's a there's a sort of database that sits behind that, at the very lowest level of the code, makes the links between all of those elements, sections, copybooks, paragraphs, whatever it may be, anything that interacts with that code really, and then can pass that, as I said, to to the AI. So, yeah, we're I mean, look, everybody's code base is different and can we guarantee 1000000% that everything is covered? I don't know. I I couldn't tell you without actually seeing the code, but, you know, this is a long standing product, very successful product set, and that we built on for the AI. So I'm confident that we we'll be able to cover pretty much everything that you come up with. And, of course, it's using a COBOL compiler, actually, isn't it? Yeah. It does. Yeah. It does. Yeah. Yeah. Good. So, it really can understand the rocket COBOL dialect as it as we're now calling it. Alright. So thanks, Gary. Then what's next? Yes. Thank you very much. So I've got Scott, you're on the hot signal. So we have a question. Actually, two different customers have asked a question, but I'm gonna put them in the same question. So we have one, using Accu Coble, and they're wondering, you know, what how what's the difference between Accu Coble and Visual Coble. And we have one using NetExpress and wondering the same thing. So I was wondering if you could maybe summarize. Okay. Well, I guess let's start with that queue and using Visual Coble for that queue customers. I think the first thing I said to you is that we we've got multiple product brands actually in Rocket that have come from Micro Focus heritage and some, you know, product lines that we've produced ourselves. NetExpress, for example, is an earlier generation product line. And then some have come back from acquisition, I think, 02/1978, I think, was an acquisition of Accu. But let's take those independently. Accu, you know, we generally would guide any Accu customer really to remain on their Accu product line because you've just done a major new release of Accu, bringing a lot of new capabilities, certainly around Visual Studio Code, but a lot around application modernization. So before you embark on any kind of plans to migrate to Visual Global, please do check-in with your account executive team and your presale presales SEs who will look at that with you and kinda help you understand really what the best path for you is. But typically, it's to remain in the world of domain of Acu, which we continue to invest in that roadmap. For Net Express, Express customers, absolutely, this is your target product upgrade path. And quite honestly, it has been for fifteen years now as we've mentioned. We delivered this first product in in 2010, and we've been innovating since and doing more, you know, more and more releases. Really, if you've got any expected lifetime left of those applications, it really is the time now is to upgrade and move to Visual Cobalt. The assurances that I can give you is that it's a very well trodden path. There are now far more customers using Visual Cobalt than we've got on any, of the other product lines. And majority of them have come from Internet Express and Server Express path in the past. So it's a highly compatible upgrade path for you. If you wanna help and discuss the details of that, you know who to reach out to. Thank you very much for that. Looking through the questions as well, we've got quite a few questions about people want links to, the resources. So people want links to see, documentation, the links that are gonna be shared in here. That will actually be sent out. So as we've mentioned, this webinar is being recorded. So that will be sent out, after this session along with a survey. So please just take, you know, ten seconds and just, give us some feedback about this webinar because we do these things because we want to, you know, engage with you and we want to help you. So we just want to make sure we can do that, to the best of our ability. So, yes, please do take some time and fill out our survey. That'd be great help to us. We probably got time for one question. So I'll ask there's one about future plans. So, for example, we've got a couple about Versus Code. You know, what's our future plans of that specifically around, you know, JVM COBOL and some of the features in our, full blown IDEs. And similarly, a question about Visual Studio 2026. With that on the horizon, do we have plans to, support 2026 Visual Studio? I don't know who wants to take that. Actually, what let me give a an answer to that, and I'll go quickly. And then, actually, maybe there's a way to close things out, Gary. We we did mention the enterprise suite webinar. Maybe you could just give people a quick idea. There's always someone here with a z background, what they can expect on that one. But it's yes to all of the above, I think. Jen is the answer to that. So there is, we've got a Kogol JVM extension out there already. We are, investing in Visual Studio code, and we're, as I mentioned before, delivering new drops of that more regularly. The adoption has been amazing of that, and it is the fastest growing toolset that we see in the industry. So we expect further growth there, and our less, investments will align accordingly. We are still supporting Visual Studio. We are still in supporting Eclipse. And we, you know, are usually very close to the release of those products when they go GA. You will certainly find you know, very shortly afterwards, we will provide support for our products there. And we've had very long standing relationships, particularly with Microsoft around Studio itself. So, hopefully, that's reassuring. More detail, though, on that in that road map, actually, if that road map deck is interested of interest to you, please reach out again, and and we can share more details there. But, Gary, maybe just to close things out very quickly, if anyone have got a z background, what can they expect, in the Enterprise Suite webinar that we ran yesterday? Okay. I'll try and be as quick as I can, which is unusual for me. Anyway, so just a very quick background, Enterprise Suite, this is typically used by customers that currently run their application workloads on the IBM z mainframe, and this enables them to move or, as we say, replatform those applications to commodity or cloud infrastructure platforms and services. And then continue maintaining and modernizing them moving forward using the equivalent development tools in that suite. Now as you can imagine, the workloads that that that run on these old the the IBM systems are huge, extremely large. And there are stringent requirements around performance, resiliency, availability, observability, security security and operability. That's not easy to say quickly. So what we you can see in that webinar are areas where we've added new or improved features in 11 to cover those. So quickly off the top of my head, we've got in continued investment in our performance and availability cluster or the PAC technology, which is the backbone to providing that performance resilient and available, platform for your applications to run. And excitedly, for those customers that have IMSTM applications, which are often the the most complex of systems, we have provided support for that as part of the pack. For observability, we use, we've been providing for a couple of releases now, open telemetry support, and we're adding tracing to that. So you can consume that data in tools like Grafana, Splunk, Dynatrace, and anything that consumes open telemetry data to help you with have greater visibility on the way that your applications, are running. Security, obviously, really, really important. And as ever, in every release, we add new features, tighter, security capabilities. And we've added stuff this time that simplify the management. You know, we provided increased visibility with some very visual representations of your security, systems. And we've also put some assistance in there around compliance. So we've got certificate checkers for TLS and lots of other stuff like that. It's really great. And finally, one of the key parts to those types of applications, the mainframe subsystem applications, is the management of the data. So we've extended our capabilities around our new secure remote data file editing tool, and this provides a very modern data editing UI. And also using client server rest capability, the ability to maybe script some data, updates using languages like Python or whatever scripting languages that you may have within your organization. So that's a very brief snapshot, Scott, into what was an hour's presentation yesterday. Right. I appreciate that, Gary. And, as I say, that link is in the deck. So if that's really something you're more interested in, you'll be able to join dial in and listen to that. We are now just over time, so it's probably time to wrap it up. Any questions that we didn't get to, apologies. But first of all, thank you for all your input and engagement, and just the attendance today. Generally, thank you for dialing in. But any questions we didn't get to, we will answer post those, updates, on the community or reach out to you directly. And I think it just kinda leads me to say, again, thank you. But when it comes to the topic of modernization, I think everyone's needs and journeys, you know, there are similarities, but there are also unique differences in your organization. And really to understand more deeply about what we have available to you, please get in touch. We'll be delighted to discuss that those needs. We've helped thousands actually of organizations go through transformative, modernization projects of one kind or another. So please do benefit from our experiences there. But for now, let me thank Jen. Welcome. Thank you. Great job. Gary, thank you to the q and a. And, Salvo, I don't know if you're still there online, but thank you so much for taking us through there. And a great idea for that quiz today. Got some great engagement. Good job. Thanks, everyone, and we'll talk soon. Thank you, everyone.