Supporting an old codebase is a pretty broad question. There are quite a few companies supporting COBOL.

But for migrations, and really anything interesting or unique, I recommend Semantic Designs. http://www.semdesigns.com/ . Past customers include ADP, the Social Security Administration, the Bank of Australia/New Zealand, and Goldman Sachs Australia.

They do everything, but COBOL migrations are their bread-and-butter. There are hundreds of COBOL dialects out there, and they have no trouble supporting all of them.

I did interned for them in 2016, and the CEO served on my thesis committee. But I'm not saying this because I worked there; I worked there because I thought they had the best tech.

This is super interesting, thank you.

But, looking at semdesign's site and info I have a question - which is if this tech exists since 2010 or so... why are all the big banks not using it? Is it just bad marketing or is there a gotcha? They are all whining about their cobol problem, this could be a fix......

Does this mean that the market is not what folks imagine?

Oh, some of the big banks are.

But: Au contraire. It's existed much longer than that.

So you've heard of products called vitamins and painkillers?

The CEO of Semantic Designs, Ira Baxter, calls the kinds of migrations and mass changes they sell "heart surgery."

As in: "How many people go to the doctor and say 'Doctor, I think I need some heart surgery?' No one."

A very common thing that happens is that a company starts a project to upgrade some dying system and gets cold feet in the middle and then scraps the project. "We survived last year, we're surviving this year, we'll survive next year." Sometimes it takes extreme pressure, like the compiler for the original language no longer existing, before they migrate.

(And it's not just the really big changes. A friend of mine, who founded another program-transformation startup, discovered this when he landed a deal using his tool to upgrade some company from PHP 4 to PHP 5. They decided that they needed way more code review than the kinds of trivial changes being made actually should require, decided not to do it, and then wound up not doing the upgrade.)

When Ira begins talking to a new customer, he asks two questions:

1. How long have you been in your job? 2. Have you tried to do this kind of thing before?

If the answer to #1 is too long, then he knows that either the manager he's talking too is risk-averse and complacent, or that he'll be promoted to his next job in the middle of the project. To make a good deal, he needs his counterpart to be someone who wants this kind of upgrade to be their big initiative that will help them rise.

If the answer to #2 is no, then he'll know that eventually talks will break down and then they'll try to do it manually or in-house by underestimating how hard it is. For their most famous project, the B-2 Stealth Bomber migration, Northrop Grumman did exactly that -- came to Semantic Designs after a failed manual migration and a failed in-house tool development effort.

So, yeah -- it's a very tough market. The buyers don't behave like you think they should.

I wrote about this some in an appendix to pathsensitive.com/2023/09/its-time-for-painkillers-vitamins-die.html

Thanks - this is extremely insightful and helpful.