Control your COBOL Future in 2018 – Q&A with Walter Sweat

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How expensive is NETCOBOL in comparison to the competitors?

From a developer perspective, the cost of NetCOBOL is comparable to most of the competitors out there. Historically, most COBOL compiler companies have charged a development license per developer.  Today, there are freeware and shareware options, but the cost is transferred to how much you pay for extra features and how much you pay for support.  It is from a deployment perspective that NetCOBOL shines – no matter how many servers are RUNNING those COBOL programs, with NetCOBOL the cost to run those programs in a production environment is zero.

Does it matter how many servers we deploy our runtimes to?

It absolutely does not.  Whether the deployed servers are Virtual Machines or stand-alone servers, it does not matter if you are deploying to one server or to 1000 servers in terms of additional cost

How often does NETCOBOL release new versions?

Fujitsu is a Japanese company with a laser keen focus on quality.  As opposed to other COBOL suppliers, who might release a new version every six months and follow that up with 4 or 5 bug fixes over the next 3 months, Fujitsu roughly releases major version updates for each of its supplied environments roughly once a year.  And it is a rare occurrence if there is ever a bug fix release – the quality is just that high.

How much have people been charges from COBOL audits?

We have talked to customers who use our competitor’s COBOL solution who are talking to us because they have seen charges arising from audits in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.  We have heard of companies who were found responsible for millions of dollars based on audits. And there has never been an audit of any existing NetCOBOL customer, since we just don’t charge for runtime fees.

Is it easy to integrate NETCOBOL with other languages?

I would say yes – since Fujitsu focuses on performance, it is a like-for-like integration.  In other words, if someone is doing development alongside COBOL in C#, the fact that NetCOBOL for .NET is a true .NET language means it is easy to integrate the two.  Likewise, if someone is doing development in C (unmanaged code) then they can use the NetCOBOL for Windows compiler.  It is only really challenging if people are trying to integrate between managed and unmanaged code environments or if they wish to go cross-platform in terms of Operating System