COBOL, or COmmon Business-Oriented Language, while one
of IT’s oldest programming languages continues to evolve, so it natively
supports more recent arrivals such as XML. Government, financial organisations
and defence agencies endorse COBOL for its contribution to enterprise-wide
applications. The next major COBOL standard release is scheduled for 2010.
It is a truism that to be successful in providing outsourced software
development services an organisation must identify the next big technological
thing and have the appropriate skills on hand to service fast growing market
demand.
However, in the relentless evolution of information technology, it is easy to
lose sight of technologies such as COBOL that have secured a long term place in
IT.
COBOL continues to enjoy widespread support for the strength and resilience
it brings to strategic and enterprise-oriented applications of major
organisations.
Mitrais has some of the youngest COBOL developers in the world
As such, Mitrais teaches COBOL skills in our graduate program with the result
that about 20 percent or more than 40 of our developers are proficient in COBOL,
as well as other disciplines.
Outside one or two major financial organisations, we are one of the largest
COBOL development organisations in the Oceanic region. We can build a COBOL team
at very short notice. Most other developers rely on a shrinking community of
COBOL expertise.
Mitrais meets the demand from its customers to provide COBOL programming and
support services across a diverse range of applications. We provide these
services around the globe through all methods of engagement -fixed price, time
and materials and seat outsourcing – as the following synopses indicate.
Since 2006 Mitrais has provided support and modification services for the
COBOL code at the heart of the ERP system of a prominent international vendor. A
Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection directly into the client’s offices
allows Mitrais software engineers to work directly on source code. This is a
prime example of a high trust relationship in which the Mitrais team is
integrated with that of the client.
Some months into a project in which Mitrais was commissioned to code a new
billing system for a government agency, our client significantly extended its
brief with us to engage our design expertise. This time and materials project
lasted 10 months.
A fixed price project called for a Mitrais team to enhance an ERP system for
a major government agency to ensure that financial statements accurately
reflected stocks held at the agency’s warehouses. Accounting for sensitive
goods, as well as the ability react quickly to ensure logistical sustainability
were key requirements of the enhancements.
In a textbook example of collaborative software development, Mitrais played a
major role in
coding and unit testing for the development of a payroll
application for users of a major ERP system in South Africa. The project leader
was in South Africa, software architect and designers in Australia and the
development team is in Bali.
Mitrais staff worked against the clock to review and remove several hundred
embedded literals within COBOL code and replace them with a macro in a project
aimed at internationalising an ERP system. One week on and the job was complete,
with a proper internal code review for quality assurance.
When Australian utilities wanted enhancements to the learning management
functionality of their ERP systems and conversion to web-based applications,
Mitrais heeded the call. With COBOL at the backend and J2EE in the front,
Mitrais developers expended 1000 man-days of effort.