If you’re a policy manager in a Fortune 1000 company, chances are that your company continues to maintain real-time business applications written in COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language).

If the challenge of making your existing mainframe COBOL applications more agile without disrupting your mission-critical systems brings you out in a cold sweat, or you simply don’t have the budget or the time to redevelop all your existing COBOL applications, then you should definitely attend DIALOG 08 to hear more about ILOG Rules for COBOL.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that, other than the hoo-ha around the whole Y2K issue, I don’t actually know a great deal about COBOL. Fortunately, Wikipedia is my friend, and ILOG’s BRMS Product Marketing team have been kind enough to bring me up to speed about why this new add-on for ILOG JRules is so significant (about 80% of the world’s top businesses do rely on COBOL to keep running, after all). Following yesterday’s official product announcement, James Taylor was also quick to provide some interesting commentary in his blog about the new add-on.

In a nutshell, ILOG Rules for COBOL brings the advantages of ILOG’s leading business rule management system (BRMS) to existing COBOL applications. The key lies in gradually moving the rules from your COBOL applications to a central repository, where they can be externally managed, and yet still executed in COBOL code.

Like it or not, COBOL isn’t going away any time soon, but with ILOG Rules for COBOL, you finally have a way to access the business logic that’s locked within your large mainframe applications. With JRules BRMS and Rules for COBOL, you can manage change in legacy applications NOW. But don’t just take my word for it: stop by the BRMS booth in the Solutions Hall at DIALOG 08 and be among the first to see demos of the new COBOL add-on and talk directly to the people who developed it.