IBM taps Watsonx gen AI to help modernise COBOL on mainframes

Tech company IBM on Tuesday announced a new generative AI-assisted product — Watsonx Code Assistant for Z. The product will help enable faster translation of COBOL to Java on ‘IBM Z’ and enhances developer productivity on the platform. IBM Z is a family name used by IBM for all of its z architecture mainframe computers.

The product, which will be enabled by a 20 billion parameter large language model (LLM) for code, is also designed to assist businesses in leveraging generative AI and automated tooling to accelerate their mainframe application modernisation — all to preserve the performance, security and resiliency capabilities of IBM Z.

This product will be generally available in the fourth quarter of this year and is being designed to help accelerate COBOL application modernisation, the company said.

“IBM is engineering Watsonx Code Assistant for Z to take a targeted and optimised approach. It’s built to rapidly and accurately convert code optimised for IBM Z, accelerate time to market and broaden the skills pool,” Kareem Yusuf, PhD, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software, said in a statement.

The COBOL data processing language supports many vital business and operational processes at organisations globally, however, using Watsonx Code Assistant for Z in comparison to other approaches could make it easier for developers to selectively and incrementally transform COBOL business services into well-architected high-quality Java code, the company said.

According to new research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, organisations are 12 times more likely to leverage existing mainframe assets rather than rebuild their application estates from scratch in the next two years. At the same time, however, the study shows that the number one challenge for those same organisations is a lack of resources and skills.

“By bringing generative AI capabilities through Watsonx to new use cases, we plan to drive real progress for our clients,” said Yusuf.

Generative AI can help developers to more quickly assess, update, validate and test the right code, allowing them to more efficiently modernise large applications and focus on higher impact tasks.

Breakthroughs in generative AI have the potential to bring about sweeping changes to the global economy, according to Goldman Sachs Research published in April. As tools using advances in natural language processing work their way into businesses and society, they could drive a 7% (or almost $7 trillion) increase in global GDP and lift productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over a 10-year period, it said.