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David Taylor, President of Asia Pacific & Japan, Micro Focus, talks to Varun Aggarwal of CTO Forum about the mainframe business in India and how COBOL is no more restricted to the platform.
Do you see new COBOL deployments in India, apart from upgrade and migration?
Yes, but a lot of the time it gets done by our partners. For example, TCS banking application, which is written on Micro Focus COBOL is earning new customers not only in India but globally and customers are running working on the COBOL platform without even realising. We are seeing a lot of work where we are upgrading customers from all versions of COBOL to new versions. So it isnt dying. It is mainly expanding but through other applications. And at the end of the day those customers in most cases never realise they are running COBOL, nor do they really need to know.
How big is cloud testing for you and how big is the market shaping up especially in India?
We have a solution called CloudBurst where we can basically test extremely large volume virtual servers globally. That service is doing very well for us. The growth in that is coming from the growing use of mobile devices in the enterprise.
Many of our customers are trying to offer their users mobile access to enterprise applications and therefore, they need to be able to test those applications effectively.
In India we are seeing a lot of development work being done on mobile applications. I think companies will allow mobile access to applications where it makes sense. However, I am not sure that they will run them on the cloud. At this stage, I see there is a lot of talk in around cloud adoption in India but I dont know how many companies are really running mission critical applications in the cloud. I am not familiar with any. What we are saying is that we work with other applications to be able to provide services to the end-users. We always have discussions with our customers, and we put in a lot of focus in their ability to modernise their applications to be able to do what they want and we are seeing a lot of values there.
Cloud really at the end of the day is just another platform, another deployment. So, from a Micro Focus perspective, if I migrate from the Mainframe to Windows, I am not seeing a lot of demand to do that for critical application where we see the mobile applications coming in from an enterprise perspective.
We see a lot of banks already providing their customers with mobile applications that can be used to view account details, transfer money and so on. They develop a mobile application which ultimately connects to customer data that lies on the banks mainframe. The customer doesnt have to worry whether it is delivered through a mainframe or a cloud that is using mainframe.
Considering most of your customers in India are in the banking and financial sector, what specific applications do you see moving onto the mobile and to the cloud?
I do believe mobile applications being deployed over the cloud. If I think of myself as a customer, I need to access my account on the go. So what customers are now doing is to tailor in those applications so that they perform much better in terms of mobile devices. And we think a lot of that is taking place in many organisations. One of the important things happening now is insurance data applications.
Cloud has a lot of advantages as it allows an individual to work on the go and not be stuck in their desktops. In terms of security, there has been a lot of work which is happening but a lot still needs to be done so that people can get confident about migrating to the cloud. In terms of financial institutions running their applications in the cloud, I am not sure much of this is happening in India but we think that things will change in the coming years as people will eventually shift to the cloud environment.
According to you which model of cloud is the best for the banking customers and how do they get the optimum benefit from that?
It is quite difficult to answer that because different banks have different approaches. When we have to provide any kind of installations we have to first visit the location and understand the structure of the organisation. There can be a lot of complexities which we need to address and we have to customise our technologies for different banks. I think private cloud is getting recognition in different banking organisations as it is easy to deploy and there are many companies which are offering competitive services to the financial organisations. Cost is the primary thing that comes to your mind when you think of migrating to the cloud.
Today, storage of data has become critical for financial organisations and I think people will have no option but to migrate to the cloud if they would like to keep their recurring costs at the lower side. Eventually, we would witness different models of cloud being adopted.
The type of adoption would vary from customer to customer according to the need and the assets of the company.
How do you see the economics of cloud working for smaller banks in India that cannot afford to set up their own data centres and host their own applications?
Yes, the economics of it absolutely makes sense. However, at the end of the day from a broad perspective, that is going to be a risk. It then boils down to the risk appetite of the bank and whether or not they want migrate to the cloud environment.
I do see risk is associated with migrating to the cloud. But the other thing is if you just think about migration the next logical extension of that would be to be able to sell those services outside of India? But then you have another issue in terms of storing the data outside of a country. Now for example, we did a migration in Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore recently we did it because they were processing the accounts from Hong Kong and the Chinese government introduced the legislation that said that financial data of a Chinese citizen cannot be stored outside of China. So the company had a choice to buy another mainframe or run the application on a different platform which obviously is what we did. So you are going to get a lot of government regulatory compliance implications coming in when you start looking outside of borders. So I dont know what Indias rules are in that area right now, you will have to store the data outside of India for Indian companies and that is one of the tricky things.
What percentage of your COBOL installed base in India or even globally is on non-mainframe environment?
It is huge. It is massive. We would probably have to do some research. Our COBOL does not run on the IBM mainframe. We have developed a COBOL compiler, which basically is perfectly compatible with the IBM mainframe COBOL platform. So what that enabled us to do is to build COBOL compilers through different platforms.
For example, we could run any mainframe application on different platforms including Linux and Windows. Windows and Linux are the most common platforms today apart from some of the proprietary UNIX environments. I use the word proprietary because they are also on a different base from the hardware vendor. So, we have never run on the IBM mainframe itself, but we can. So, we can do development on these platforms because our COBOL compiler is very compatible that has enabled us to offers different types of development.
And when you send them back to the mainframe, it just runs perfectly, you dont have to do anything.
Growth for our business comes from two main areas. The first is our migration business. Migration means that we take an application from the mainframe and run it in the distributed world. So we expand the footprint of COBOL as a result of that. And then second area is actually the people who have developed their applications in and around COBOL platform and run it on the variety of different platforms. TCS banking application is an example, Oracles People Soft is written on our platform, and literally there are thousands and thousands of applications that have been written in Micro Focus COBOL that is sold around the world and so that is what expands the footprint of COBOL.
What are your plans in India when it comes to migration business as well as cloud testing?
With the business, we are seeing a lot of growth. We are seeing more companies developing on our platforms to take products to market. The mainframe business as you know is not big in India as there are not that many accounts. But what we are doing is instead of talking to those customers about unnecessary migrations we are trying to help them in terms of lowering their cost of ownership of mainframe applications.
India dominates that market globally as you know. And so what we have is an analytical technology which enables a person sitting at their business to do their job perfectly. When there is a person sitting at a desk answering multiple support issues from multiple customers and maintenance issues from multiple customers, he needs technological solutions to make his task easier and we are offering just that which makes us acceptable to the customers. We have technologies that can very quickly analyse the code that any person is working on and that makes the job of that person easier.
The testing business in India is very strong, providing services globally.
- Courtesy: CTO Forum
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