Kenneth Smith, Senior Consultant

For Kenneth Smith, with over 25 years mainframe applications and systems programming experience using COBOL and Assembler, Fujitsu COBOL enhances his productivity by allowing him to create Windows test harnesses in his most fluent language. Kenneth, a Senior Consultant, works for the IT department of a major oil company that operates in Alaska.

Programmer	Kenneth Smith, a highly experienced mainframe developer tasked with evaluating ways to enhance legacy applications or to bring those applications to a client/server environment.
Company	Information Technology Department of a major oil company in Alaska
Application	Any legacy application.
Environment	Kenneth works in a Windows NT desktop environment with connections to the company's mainframe site.
Software Used	Whatever is being evaluated, for example: MQ Series® CICS Clients Working with Visual Basic®
Fujitsu COBOL Advantages	For Kenneth, his most fluent language. Seamless integration with Visual Basic. Highly competitive price.
Benefits	Greater effectiveness from a key individual.

Mainframe COBOL Background
Legacy to Client/Server Evaluations
Fujitsu COBOL - the Most Productive Solution
Reviewing the Fujitsu COBOL Experience

Mainframe COBOL Background
Like many key employees who are experts in their company's business and applications, Kenneth has a strong mainframe background with years of COBOL programming experience.

Kenneth's value to his company now is not so much as a programmer but as a person who knows the company's systems, and who understands the reliability and integrity required in enterprise applications.

Legacy to Client/Server Evaluations
Kenneth's oil company is making a strong move toward Windows, Visual Basic and client/server architectures while maintaining a considerable investment and value in mainframe legacy applications.

Kenneth has therefore been given the task of evaluating ways to enhance the legacy applications or bring the legacy code to the client/server environment. This often involves creating test harnesses to see how well a particular product can be integrated with the existing software.

Now working on Windows NT, Kenneth observes, "I taught myself Visual Basic but I wasn't programming in it all the time - certainly not frequently enough to become as fluent as I am in COBOL. My challenge was how could I program sporadically, yet be as productive as I wanted to be?"

For Kenneth, there were two disadvantages to using Visual Basic:

1. Although he could achieve the desired results in Visual Basic, the amount of programming he was doing was not sufficient to bring total fluency. This was frustrating as the test harnesses took longer to construct than Kenneth thought was necessary.
   
   
2. Often the test harnesses needed code that existed in COBOL on the mainframe but had to be rewritten when programming in Visual Basic.
   

Fujitsu COBOL - the Most Productive Solution
Kenneth knew that he could create the test harnesses much faster if he could use COBOL in which he was totally fluent. However, other COBOL products or licensing options seemed too expensive or didn't have the desired functionality.

Kenneth saw Fujitsu COBOL at a special offer price. He reflects, "The price was really attractive - I had nothing to lose by trying the product." He quickly recognized that Fujitsu COBOL gave him the features and functions he required:

• Graphical interfaces for his test harnesses, totally controlled by COBOL code (using PowerCOBOL).
• The ability to use mainframe COBOL code as and when required.
• Seamless integration with Visual Basic - frequently one of the pieces to be included in the overall evaluation
  
  

With these two benefits, test harness production became the trivial task Kenneth felt it should be. "With Fujitsu COBOL, I was able to focus my time and attention on the evaluation of the new products, not on the test harness programming."

Reviewing the Fujitsu COBOL Experience
Asked to give an overall impression of Fujitsu COBOL, Kenneth made the following comments:

"It was easy to install and easy to run."
"I have yet to find something I cannot do using Fujitsu COBOL."
"I like the Project Manager - it does a good job of integrating the different pieces, and doing the builds for you. Also the debugger is a necessary and useful tool."
"My learning was helped by the exercise on working with Visual Basic in the Getting Started manual and the sample code on the web site."

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