Mr. Todd Margo, Product Manager in The Source Recovery Company has kindly agreed to answer our questions about his company experiences with CobolTransfomer.

Q: How many employees do work in your company?
A: 20

Q: What was your company revenue in 1997?
A: $1M

Q: How many lines of Cobol code does pass through your company?
A: Our company offers a service and a technology that recovers lost Cobol source code for external customers.
In 1997, we recovered nearly 200,000 lines of Cobol source code for primarily Fortune 500 companies.
In 1998, we expect to recover more than 1,000,000 lines of lost Cobol source code.

Q: For what platforms do you recover source code?
A: We recover source code for applications run on the IBM MVS operating system. They are typically critical business applications.

Q: Please describe your product that uses CobolTransformer.
A: Our company offers a service and a technology that recovers Cobol source code from compiled load modules. Customers come to us when (for whatever reason) they cannot find a current copy of the source code for a running Cobol program. We have an expert system technology, called ReSource (TM), that automates most of the source recovery process.
We use CobolTransformer to "beautify" the recovered source code before sending the code back to the customer.

Q: What are your experiences with CobolTransformer? How well did it work for you?
A: The product has worked very well. Customers remark favorably about the quality of the formatted recovered source code.

Q: What other other approaches to beautification have you considered?
A: We considered writing our own formatting function (a "beautifier function"), but decided we could not cost justify developing our own.

Q: Why have you selected CobolTransformer?
A: It was primarily price, in the sense of cost avoidance. Using CobolTransformer eliminated the need for us to write a Cobol source code formatter. The CobolTransformer also supports all of the various Cobol dialects -- a key requirement for us.

Q: How much time and/or money your company is likely to save by using CobolTransformer?
A: Beautification function would probably take 6-man months plus ongoing maintenance (approximately $40K in Georgia). This is exclusive of the parser/lexer part of beautification tool.

Q: Are you satisfied with timeliness and quality of Customer Support?
A: Yes, we have appreciated the prompt customer service from Siber Systems. When we initially evaluated the product, we found a couple of minor problems, which Siber Systems promptly fixed.

Q: Any additional comments?
A: The CobolTransformer is robust and of high quality. The architects at Siber Systems seemed to have well understood the potential variety of applications that CobolTransformer might be subjected to -- both in the end-user and developer marketplace.