Micro Focus

David Taylor, President of Micro Focus for APJ, says many governments built mainframes for critical applications to handle bulk data processing, such as financial information, government data and health records.

The case study details how Chyun Huei Health Technologies used Micro Focus ACUCOBOL-GT to develop an application that consolidated all IT infrastructure for the Taiwan Department of Health, which operates 28 hospitals across the country. The new centralized approach saved DOH US$6.1 million in ordering and inventory costs, US$17.2 million in application development costs, and US$1.7 million in maintenance fees.

There is value in old COBOL applications but can I put some of the cool functionality of AJAX and let customers create new smaller APPS using mashups? Governments being the largest single consumer of technology have legacy applications written in old, obscure programming languages. The bureaucratic nature has perpetuated the life of these applications for ages. And its not changing any time soon. So here is help for those still using COBOL in the government.