Computer Language Celebrates 50^th Birthday By Staying Active 

Research reveals people use COBOL at least ten times a day without even realising it 

Help celebrate COBOL’s 50^th birthday at www.cobol.com 

NEWBURY, England, 28 May, 2008 — Micro Focus® (LSE.MCRO.L), a leading provider of enterprise application management and modernisation solutions, today launches research which reveals the extent to which COBOL, a computer language invented 50 years ago today, continues to underpin our everyday lives.

Based on research of 1,993 adults in the UK, people interact with COBOL at least ten times throughout the course of an average working day. Yet, despite using the technology so often, only 18% of those surveyed had ever actually heard of COBOL. Additionally, equivalent research conducted by Micro Focus in the US shows the average American relies on COBOL at least 13 times per day.

Despite its age, COBOL (which stands for Common Business-Oriented Language) plays a pivotal role in running most of the world’s businesses and public services. COBOL powers almost all ATM transactions globally, runs nearly three quarters of the world’s business applications, and books hundreds of holidays every single day. Whenever a financial transaction is made of any kind – from a consumer buying a DVD online to a multinational corporation transferring funds to its suppliers – COBOL will most likely be involved. There is understood to be over 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence, with hundreds more being created every single day.[1]

Micro Focus’ research showed that people in the UK make two online transactions every week, withdraw cash from an ATM every two days and use their credit/debit card every single day. People use their mobile phone eight times each day - from making or answering a call, browsing the internet, or sending/receiving a text message. With all of these instances involving an interaction with COBOL, people use COBOL over 60 times every week, equating to over 250 times a month. Yet in most instances, they don’t even know they’re doing it.

Micro Focus commissioned the research to coincide with COBOL’s 50^th birthday today. 28 May 1959 marks 50 years since the Short Range Committee was established at a meeting at the Pentagon. Chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National Bureau of Standards, it was the Short Range Committee that would soon create the very first description of COBOL, thus marking the birth of a language that defined the computing era.

David Stephenson, UK Country General Manager, Micro Focus states, “COBOL emerged at the very birth of the computer industry, yet despite numerous other languages’ attempts to steal its crown, none have proved to be as well-suited to their tasks as COBOL. It predates the microprocessor by a whole decade (1969), and was already running the bulk of the world’s biggest businesses before the likes of Microsoft (1975), Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977) had even been established. The founders of Google, arguably the most pervasive of modern technologies, were mere toddlers at this time, yet COBOL’s robustness, core performance and ability to adapt to newer technologies means there are still 200 times more COBOL transactions every day than searches on Google itself.”[2]

“We see the value that COBOL applications continue to deliver to businesses every day, as we help our customers maximise their investment by modernizing core applications,” concluded Stephenson.

Jan Stuart, a COBOL programmer since 1978 believes strongly in COBOL’s future, “COBOL is just a great language for business and it isn't going away. It has kept me in steady employment for many decades, but despite retiring, I’m in as much demand as ever.”

Alan Rodger, Senior Research Analyst at Butler Group (a Datamonitor company) compares COBOL’s heritage with that of the internal combustion engine, “COBOL can be thought of as IT’s equivalent to the ubiquitous power source of automobiles - both technologies enabled the human population to benefit in many ways from new possibilities'.  He continued, “COBOL has been the prevalent language for developing business applications throughout the greater part of five decades. Systems and applications written in COBOL remain in widespread use within the vertical sectors that spend some of the world’s largest IT budgets – such as Finance, Government, Manufacturing, and Telecoms – as well as numerous others.”

More information on COBOL can be found on www.cobol.com.

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NOTES TO EDITORS:

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com

About the research

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 1993 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 3rd - 6th April 2009. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

Facts about COBOL (Source: Datamonitor (November 2008),‘COBOL – continuing to drive value in the 21st Century’)

·         Around 200 billion lines of COBOL code are in live operation

·         75% of the world’s business data is processed in COBOL

·         90% of global financial transactions are processed in COBOL

·         There are 1.5 - 2 million developers, globally, working with COBOL code

·         Around 5 billion lines of new COBOL code are added to live systems every year

[1] Datamonitor (November 2008), ‘COBOL – continuing to drive value in the 21st Century’ [2] Computerworld (18 April 2008), ‘Saving Cobol’ (http://blogs.computerworld.com/saving_cobol)