GO FROM COBOL TO JAVA!

In the 90’s the world of the internet took on mythological proportions; there wasn’t an ill in the world that wasn’t going to be cured by proper use of this online panacea. Businesses would be able to know their clients’ needs and wants before their customers even thought them. Universities would go online and teach the world from the comfort of their living rooms. Governments would not only be able to deliver on-line voting, but, through democracy and expenditure accountability, become paragons of leadership.

Almost a decade later we have come to realize that the internet is only a reflection of the real world with all its human limitations and potential. That, rather than radicalizing our existence it has merely become another tool that we use to perform our usual assortment of daily tasks.

The truth is that it is difficult for humans to change the way that they do things. Survey after survey from the likes of Gartner and CDI shows that an internet centric company can effortlessly reduce operational cost, increase ROI by 400% and deliver closer to real time benefits to customers, vendors and owners. Despite this, we find that companies consider a migration to the internet a Cost rather than an Investment towards their future success.

Yes, the Internet future with all its benefits was there, but our ability to change was not. However this isn’t the tragedy one might suppose, because, after all, the Internet was not a mature product.

Fortunately for us here in the Southern hemisphere, all Latin America is still using mostly Legacy technologies with COBOL and Visual Basic, C, Proprietary Databases and Client/Sever environments. Businesses are running unique solutions that are proprietary and expensive to maintain. Meanwhile, Europe and North America have happily invested billions of dollars to migrate towards Internet centric solutions. South and Central America remain largely untouched by this model and the reason why is our opportune resistance to change.

Resistance to change in a world that seems to be changing its methodology every six month is not a bad thing. If Latin America had caught the Internet fever in 1995, today it would have been involved in a quagmire of Internet technologies, contradictions, evolutions, and billions spent without proper results to show for it.

While Europe and North America have spent billions in migrations to the latest technologies, they have failed to gain the true rewards or productivity increases because the technologies had simply not matured. Technology was too rapidly evolving and early adopters inadvertently became no more than paying test dummies. In fact, it wasn’t till Gartner released its now famous report noting how inappropriately companies were overspending for IT solutions, that corporations finally got the picture. They were pursuing the perfect solution and the perfect solution kept on changing standard horizons, and costing more and more.

We could all blame Microsoft because it fragmented the industry by refusing to migrate to Open Standards and Open Technologies, but the real blame lies in the infancy of the Internet technologies and, more, the infancy of Global Standards. Who knew in 1995 which programming language or which communication protocols would truly dominate the NET? No one knew, myself included. We weren’t that worried about standards back then, we actually thought that the Internet was the solution and never really concerned ourselves by which methodology we got there. If we programmed in C or Cobol or Visual Basic, and used an emulator to publish on the Internet, we thought we had accomplished our aim, of course we hadn’t accomplished our aim, we were only making it more difficult to reach. But then again back in the early 90’s the Internet was no more than a glorified messaging system with the ability to publish information. It did not take too long for us to realize that the ability of the Internet to grant global access to millions of potential clients while handling business processes meant that each penny you spent on servers and communications could empty your bank account. The model to turn Client/Server architectures into emulated Internet solutions was defunct. Early adopters of this faulty concept had to go back to their bankers and ask for more money to bail out their operations.

While early adopters jumped online and fuelled a demand for Internet solutions and Engineers, Internet companies saw their raging popularity aggregate billions of worth to Wall Street. It seemed that the bubble would never burst, but we now know better; one day the Net’s net value did not meet any logical criteria for return on investment, and there the bubble popped!

Contrary to popular expectation, after the Internet bubble burst the Internet continued to thrive. Never in the history of the Net has there been fewer users, more and more people and more and more businesses hop on the Internet every year, yet the industry continues to grow, and has never had a year where its growth went negative. It has always been positive! Sure, large and small Internet players faded or went bust, but the Internet as a whole, and as an industry, kept growing, creating jobs, maturing, and with maturity it only got better and more realistic.

But first, the mindset of the eighties and nineties had to be eradicated… That you had to own and develop the technology and that everything had to run on a client/server environment was an attitude that had to be archived.

ENTERPRISE FOUNDATION STANDARIZATION
A very strange thing happened on the way to the Internet, the industry became obsessed with interoperability, compatibility, process interaction and communications. It is no longer considered a brilliant idea to own proprietary computing environments. In fact, proprietary has become the persona non grata of the industry.

Today we find that there are only two serious Enterprise standards playing in the market: .NET, sponsored by Microsoft, and J2EE, sponsored by the likes of IBM, SAP, Peoplesoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and BEA, etc.

The defining architectural standard for how we develop a software program is now Unified Modeling Language (UML). This magnificent and elegant methodology for defining a solution is programming language independent, that is, once designed in UML you can program it in any language. UML also gives companies autonomy from IT professionals; by allowing anyone able to read a UML schematic access to the logic innards of an application.

Based on development infrastructures, security, global deployment, adoptability, scalability, object orientation and reliability, there are really only two true Internet Centric programming languages: Microsoft’s C# and Sun Microsystems Java.

Impressively, there is an industry wide agreement for communications and interoperability: SOAP (Simple Objects Access Protocol), which will greatly embody the new bold world of WebServices, and a solid MetaData defining model, XML Extensible Markup Language), which finally allows for the data to intelligently advise client applications of its character definitions. Best of all, these protocols are followed by both the .NET and J2EE camps, thus allowing for a clear approach to heterogeneous interactions.

The Internet and Java have also done away with the localized simplicity of the Operating System. While Linux, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems might be slugging it out to control the OS server market, the truth be told, that war no longer matters. The operating system is a has been, destroyed by the Internet’s demanding architecture of distributed processes to bring in the benefits of load balancing, clustering and peer to peer process distribution, where you don’t know, nor does it matter if your Internet server is going to be in Japan or in Chile. Nor do you care if parts of your application are running whole or as parts of a virtual whole throughout a server farm.

What matters today is not your Operating System, it is your Middleware. IBM-Websphere, Web Logics-BEA, Sun Microsystems-SunOne, Oracles-IAS, Open Source JBOSS, these are the Internet’s operating systems. Designed to communicate with the rest of the world, these are not server or PC operating systems, these are Internet Operating Environments that compile, publish and interoperate your process and/or applications across logical geographies without concern for time or physical location.

Even the simple fact that today we really only have one browser, Internet Explorer from Microsoft, has helped to simplify the way we view and use applications. In the old days, every application had its own look and feel and it took time to master. Today, thanks in large part to the limitations imposed by browser technology, most applications look and feel very similar, and require minimal training to have a user up and running.

Standardization is now a solid reality within the Internet foundation.

WHY OWN IT?
But perhaps the most defining change, and the change that need to occur for the internet world to become the standard method of application and service delivery system for Businesses, Government and the Educational communities, is the precipitous fall of the in-house, IT department, or the In-sourced Application.

Gone are the days when IT was a paradise that could only be inhabited by Fortune 1000 corporations because they were the only ones that could afford the technology gurus and their expensive supercomputers. Gone are the days when small to medium size businesses made a valiant effort to own an IT department, while they were held hostage by inadequate budgets, error-prone programmers and proprietary technologies.

Today’s savvy Managers know that precious time, energy and money have been thoroughly wasted in trying to own the technology. It is now widely understood that owning technology is a high-risk enterprise that should only be attempted by those with flexible budgets and professional IT on staff. Today we know that businesses lost their core competency edge in the 80’s and 90’s because they were also trying to be technologists. We can accept that the technology should be left to core technology houses, and that it is more productive to avoid the in-house solution and to adopt Outsourced or Application Service Providers that give you standardize processes, faster time to market, and quality, offering the latest and best enterprise technologies at affordable prices.

Gone are the days of huge, risky investments in IT, which, during the inevitable downtimes, would stick you with high fixed cost and inflexible infrastructures. Today’s ASP and Outsourced solutions delivery models adjust your cost and infrastructure based on your business cycles.

The entire Internet has dramatically evolved thanks to its standardization and adoption of complementing technologies. Equally, software developers have learned an important lesson: that it is not about the technology, it is about the solution. Customers don’t want to see the technology; you don’t have to learn auto mechanics to use your car, so why should you have to know technical acronyms to invest in software solutions. These days, customers want solutions, they want results, and they want to gain in efficiencies. When IBM bought the consulting services division from PricewaterhouseCoopers the message for the industry was clear, we are not selling technology anymore.

The Internet today offers clear cut choices with definable benefits and a positive Return On Investment. The days where migrating to the Internet was a trip into uncertainty are over; the technologies are now more affordable, the industry and expertise has grown professionally, and the dirty work of debugging Internet technologies has been done by Asia, Europe and North America.

For Latin America the immediate benefit is real: Go from COBOL to Java without the painful steps in between.

RC