BluePhoenix Solutions this week announced a solution for migrating mainframe customers from outdated or unsupported versions of Cobol to Cobol Language Environment (LE). Older Cobol compilers are no longer supported for DB2 V8 and CICS TS V3.1, BluePhoenix said. Only the Cobol LE runtime is supported for these environments. DB2 V8 only supports Enterprise Cobol V3.4 and starting with CICS TS V3.1, transactions c BluePhoenix Solutions this week announced a solution for migrating mainframe customers from outdated or unsupported versions of Cobol to Cobol Language Environment (LE). Older Cobol compilers are no longer supported for DB2 V8 and CICS TS V3.1, BluePhoenix said. Only the Cobol LE runtime is supported for these environments. DB2 V8 only supports Enterprise Cobol V3.4 and starting with CICS TS V3.1, transactions compiled with OS/VS Cobol or earlier must be converted and re-compiled to an LE environment. With IBM’s withdrawal of support for older Cobol versions, mainframe customers must migrate to LE environments to receive full support for mission-critical systems and implement new technologies and architectures such as SOA, BluePhoenix said. “Mainframe customers are facing a major challenge with IBM’s withdrawal of support for older versions of COBOL,” said Arik Kilman, CEO of BluePhoenix Solutions, in a statement released by the company. “Especially now, as SOA projects continue to proliferate, mainframe customers are looking for ways to leverage their existing DB2 and CICS application components as reusable resources in SOA environments. Our enhanced solution provides an excellent means for these customers to rapidly and safely migrate their existing systems to LE conforming environments upon which they can build for the future.”The Blue Phoenix offering features a service that identifies, upgrades and recompiles non-LE-compliant modules. Source code and executables are analyzed. A report is provided on code and modules that need to be modified. The BluePhoenix Cobol LE enabler tool modifies selected source code, compiles impacted modules and promotes development of cost-effective test plans before migrating the LE code. IBM declined to comment on the BluePhoenix announcement. Technology Industry