A Report From the Press

Glowng report about Unum insurance using AWS Transform to rip and rewrite 1.5M liines of COBOL for ONLY $20M ($13/line). Touted as an enormous savings over the previous proposals: www.computerweekly.com/news/3666…

The story is otherwise uninteresting … one of many. Two things stand out. 1.5M lines of code is a very small body of COBOL. We frequently saw proof of concept applications three to ten times that size back in the day (ten years ago). The story was about replacing “green screens” which raised eyebrows, most of that was converted to Web interfaces years ago but there is not enough detail to further comment.

Our take on work like this is that you recompile (lift and shift) what doesn’t really need re-architecting. Typically for well under $5 per line of code even with the usual hiccups. So there are stories within stories behind this.

Don’t let yourself ignore the possibility that half to four-fifths of the modernization project could just be a recompile to more modern tech at a fraction the cost.