To 2050 and Beyond………

This week, Software AG made possibly the most customer centric press announcement in its long history: the intention to support its Adabas and Natural[1] customer base until at least 2050.

As Chief Customer Officer, I see this as an industry unprecedented initiative: recognizing and protecting customer investments for over three-quarters of a century after they were first made (originally launched in 1971, two launch customers are still using Adabas. It is all about the performance![2]). This is an initiative I am proud to be part of and opens our eyes to life outside the hype cycle. The IT industry is facing a huge challenge – the IT generation change – and every vendor that has made mission and business critical commitments to its customers needs to face up to it.

These 45 years of customer investment, and our corresponding 35 year support commitment, started me thinking about the huge generational change facing the IT industry as a whole, the longevity of technologies that no longer make headlines or hype cycles, but still run the large majority of today’s businesses.

Just like Star Trek Next Generation, the entire IT industry is faced with replacing retiring actors (or in this case, DBAs, developers, system administrators) to keep an incredible and long-term success story going. Take COBOL (never mind RPG, FORTRAN etc.) as the primary language of mainframe based development. It is estimated by IBM that 350 billion lines of COBOL code are in operation globally, processing up to 30 billion transactions representing one trillion dollars of business daily. Looking just at the USA, 95% of ATM transactions, 80% of point of sale transactions and over 90% of holiday bookings use Cobol. The average American probably interacts with the language more than 10 times a day. Actually if you bank in the US, fly in the US, invest in the US or interact with state Government in the US you are more than likely to interact with Adabas & Natural too.

This IT infrastructure, which doesn’t appear on any hype cycle, keeps the world running smoothly and will be with us for the next 100 years. The cost, and risk, of replacing 350 billion lines of code (which represents a two trillion dollar investment itself) is simply enormous. And it still works of course. It has been said that if you run hardware long enough, it breaks. If you run software long enough, it works. Natural, Cobol or RPG applications simply work.

Which is why finding a new generation of programmers (the average age of a COBOL programmer is currently 55) to keep these well-oiled machines - well, well-oiled - will be a high priority task for the next decade. This generational change will of course affect every language eventually. I have already seen articles such as “Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor”. This will be a recurring issue in the IT industry.

The IT industry is a hotbed of innovation with ever more marvelous technologies coming into view, being used by early adopters, finding mainstream markets and disrupting the way things have always been done. Future technologies that will better the quality of live for everyone. But the IT industry has also to keep one eye on that long tail of the hype-cycle, that hundred year tail-off where the most successful technologies, the deeply embedded IT DNA, that keeps delivering business value day after day. All IT vendors should keep this in mind when planning their technology roadmaps. There cannot be a recurring generation cycle of skills shortages or pressures to re-invent the enterprise application wheel.

This is the background to the Adabas & Natural 2050 initiative which has the goal of supporting customers in training new talents to continue modernizing, managing and operating their enterprise applications. This is not your mom and pop modernization either, but a vision of extending Adabas & Natural to play a strategic part in enterprise digitalization and whatever comes next.

It also qualifies Adabas & Natural for the “Software Hall of Fame”. Take a bow Software AG R&D - and welcome to the new generation of developers too!

Your thoughts are welcome!

[1] Software AG’s first generation products: the high performance database Adabas released in 1972 and the 4GL Natural some years later.

[2] To put Adabas performance in perspective, transaction speeds of over 1.1 million commands per seconds, in perspective. If every spectator at all sixteen NFL games on a particular weekend were to simultaneously ask one bank, running one database, to send their account statuses to their cell phones; they would all receive simultaneous sub-second replies. That is, if the network could handle the traffic.