It was 5 years ago that we announced the development of the SPROCKET conversion service. One of the consistent messages that we’ve been hearing from our clients is that they love the SAS to PySpark migration solution, but they want more. Many of our customers are desperate to not only get rid of mainframe SAS, but also decommission their mainframes altogether. But, to do so not only requires migration away from SAS, but to free themselves from other legacy mainframe based technologies as well, namely COBOL.
COBOL code has had a massive foothold in large institutions for decades, stifling innovation. Like SAS it has adapted to more modern systems, but fundamentally it was designed in a vastly different era of computing. Also, like SAS it suffers from a lack of resources that still understand the language.
We believe the answer to both Mainframes and COBOL code is PySpark. Battle tested by thousands on customers on a massive scale, Spark makes an ideal replacement platform for expensive Mainframes. It is free, infinitely scalable and fault tolerant, and it can run on commodity hardware, not expensive custom built machines. We’re not alone in seeing Spark as the next gen Mainframe, there’s even a simple and mature COBOL data source for Spark. Why PySpark, because Python is a simple language that is easy to write (and more importantly read and understand).
Our SPROCKET solution is so powerful, we can solve this next great challenge; automating the conversion of not only SAS but also COBOL to PySpark. We are kicking off a project to extend SPROCKET into this exciting new and also decidedly old direction.
If you are interested to know more information, please reach out and contact us @ [email protected]