Mr. Goldman, Vice-President of Development of Software Conversion House, has kindly agreed to answer our questions about his company experiences with CobolTransformer.

Q: How many employees does your company have?
A: 60

Q: How many lines of Cobol code does your company maintain?
A: Millions when taking into account the fact that we do both customer projects and market conversion tools to be used used by others.

Q: What are Operating Systems that you use for developing and running Cobol conversions?
A: UNIX, NT, VMS.

Q: Please describe your projects or products that use CobolTransformer.
A: Two projects that may turn into products:

• Conversion of a large, distributed COBOL logistics application and data on a Tandem platform:
  • Conversion from Enscribe (Tandem flat files) to Non-Stop SQL including data structures which are "learned" automatically by scanning COBOL record descriptions translated to Non-Stop SQL and written out as SQL scripts.
  • Data conversion.
  • Automatic search, translate and replace of Cobol I/O statements to SQL statements embedded within the new programs.
  • Automatic conversion from Enform to SQL ReportWriter and Cobol with embedded SQL.
• Automatic conversion of Wang Cobol to MicroFocus Cobol.

Q: Describe your experiences with CobolTransformer in your projects. How well did it work for your projects?
A: It allowed us to eliminate any work required for parsing and allowed us to focus our resources on the actual conversion application.

• There is very good flexibility, robustness and reliability.
• Time to setup & start being productive was pleasantly minimal!
• It has lived up to the documented functionality and behavior.

Q: What other similar or competing products have you considered?
A: Ready made specific packages.

Q: Why have you selected CobolTransformer over competition, if any? Was it price, service, quality, or something else?
A: There are several reasons:

• The response to questions was timely and professional,
• The references were all solid,
• We also reviewed the documentation,
• Availability of sources,
• Built to be extensible.

Q: How much time and/or money your company has saved by using CobolTransformer?
A: About 6 man months for a functional (but narrow scope) kernel with an additional 1-2mm per product. These 6 man-months would satisfy our immediate development needs but would not provide the same depth and coverage as CobolTransformer.

Q: What you did not like about CobolTransformer? Any suggestions for improvement?
A: Would like to have the ability to have more than one parser active a time.
Siber Systems Note: This feature will be implemented in the next version.

Q: Are you satisfied with timeliness and quality of Customer Support?
A: Yes.

Q: Do you have anything to say in conclusion?
A: We recommend use of CobolTransformer.
Our experience to date has been positive and satisfactory in all aspects.