IBM mainframes have always been great at backwards compatibility, but the compatibility comes at a price. While an app developed many years ago will generally run faster on the very latest systems hardware and software, it won’t be able to take advantage of the latest features- such as XML or Java acceleration through algorithms or specialist processors. With a major refresh of its compiler however IBM has addressed this issue, so that now mainframe applications can offer what I like to call forwards compatibility, often through a straightforward recompile. Cobol just got more useful – supporting modern data structures and bringing significant performance improvements. In mainframes many customers pay to the peak load, rather than the average, so anything that shaves those peaks can save a lot of money.
Hope you enjoy this show, sponsored by IBM.
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