Proposed program seeks to award grants to institutions of higher education to provide courses relating to critical core computer languages
Santa Clara, Calif. – July 28, 2021 - Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO; NYSE: MFGP) today announced their full support for U.S. Representative Matt Cartwright’s Grace Hopper Code for Us Act to support universities and colleges “in the development and implementation of courses of instruction regarding maintaining, developing, and modernizing information systems utilizing critical legacy computer languages.” With thousands of successful modernization projects completed for customers around the world, the expertise of Micro Focus was requested in the bill’s development for the company’s rich history of leadership in application, process and infrastructure modernization activities.
“As foundational elements of IT and business transformation, insufficient investments in critical business programming languages like COBOL puts our most successful organizations and government departments at risk” said Neil Fowler, Micro Focus General Manager of Application Modernization and Connectivity. “With our company’s work in modernizing business programming languages and investing in future talent with our Micro Focus COBOL Academic Program, we are honored to support this U.S. House of Representatives’ bill to ensure the next generation of programmers is well-versed in these increasingly-important and critical computer languages.”
The proposed bill seeks to give three-year grants of no more than $5,000,000 to five U.S. institutions of higher education. The grants will support courses, scholarships and internships for students choosing to learn about maintaining, developing and modernizing core computer languages like COBOL, Assembly, PL/I and others.
“A lot of sectors are seeing a mismatch between the skills workers have and what employers need. Training workers for jobs that are in demand now is key to getting more people back to work and continuing our economic recovery,” said Rep. Cartwright. “When it comes to IT, that mismatch was painfully clear as government agencies struggled to keep their computer systems using older coding languages running during the pandemic. The Grace Hopper Code for Us Act will help prepare workers for good-paying jobs available now in maintaining and modernizing our critical government and private sector information systems.”
As recent Micro Focus research shows, modernization projects using an incremental and continuous improvement model achieve superior results when compared to other project-based approaches including the ripping and replacing of core business applications like those written in COBOL. With 92% of IT leaders regarding their COBOL applications as strategic to their business, this legislation has the potential to support the training of the next generation of programmers for not only proper application maintenance, but for the modernization of these core applications that continue to underpin some of the nation’s most critical IT processes.
To provide an understanding of the requirements for change from an operational, or business, perspective, Micro Focus’ Modernization Maturity Model highlights the most important considerations any organization should have when embarking on a modernization journey. By helping organizations bridge now and next, Micro Focus has the experience and application, process, and infrastructure modernization solutions to enable innovation without added cost and risk.
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