> it's pretty unreasonable for them to not have a convincing modernisation plan The planning isn't the issue, it's the conviction, resolve, determination...wha

> it's pretty unreasonable for them to not have a convincing modernisation plan The planning isn't the issue, it's the conviction, resolve, determination...whatever you want to call it. COBOL modernization is quite expensive and fraught with major risk. You're talking about multi-year efforts where the key players who initiate the effort are often not around to see it through. Limited legacy resources, poor-to-absent documentation, mission critical systems...it's a mess no one internally wants to touch or take the fall for. MicroFocus, Blu Age (now part of AWS), TSRI, and plenty of other companies are happy to take your money and tell you it can be done, and it certainly can be done technically. The reality is the cost benefit is often years down the line, so keeping the right people around to sustain the effort and see it through financially and technically is the tallest of enterprise orders. So it's the old two-step: 1) Pay IBM for another three years of support and licensing and 2) Go through the motions of migration planning then repeat Step 1.