After much deliberation, agonising over strategy, considering the views from diametrically opposed technicians, you have finally decided to proceed with a Legacy Modernisation project. Your business case makes it a no-brainer. Millions saved in licensing costs in year one alone. Your old COBOL applications, a mixture of time-consuming batch and archaic CICS screens, will be […]
Tag Archives: Microfocus
My legacy modernisation company had started well, but not without some sizeable bumps in the road. It was time for some consolidation… By mid 2015 the Proof Of Concept had drifted towards an unsatisfactory though predictable conclusion, but I was getting several leads from Microfocus. These were all COBOL users that had no idea how […]
With seven graduates integrated into the IT department I was free to move on to other things, but first I had to persuade the new management team that “The Training Guy” could do more than just teach… As the graduate training programme came to an end in the autumn of 2008, and the new management regime […]
New century, new start. Or in my case, not so new as I returned to familiar ground in the centre of Manchester… Agencies can be a rare and strange breed. Even when you decide that you want to switch contracts they rarely help you, its almost as if they are in denial. This appeared to […]
After three contracts travelling to Leeds, Chester and Oldham, it was a welcome change to head back to the easily commutable Manchester city centre… By Spring 1996 the fashion retailer had ditched Mantis. The 4GL that worked particularly well with the hierarchical database Supra was causing all sorts of problems. Performance, record locks, unfamiliarity; it […]
Eleven years is a long time to be in the same job. Could I perform as part of a team? Would my coding skills be up to scratch? And what was the beer like in Manchester? The last few weeks of my time at the brewery should have been a period of handover, but […]
A few years into my IT career I ditched Assembler for COBOL and hoped that I would never have to go back… COBOL was a revelation. It was horse drawn carriage to motor car, Betamax to VHS, black and white to colour. After the relatively slow and long-winded Assembler, I could churn out COBOL code […]