I will send the reference privately, but am uncomfortable with putting it on a public forum because of the verbage about not copying any of the Gartner Group's documents in any form. 

I'm surprised that the Cobol Report Newsletter felt free to send the URL to everyone on their mailing list.

>>> "Boris Kortiak" <[log in to unmask]> 02/12 11:58 AM >>>
Doug,

Could you be a little more specific in where to find the referenced article.  I looked around for a long time (ok, I was reading all the other good stuff), but wasn't able to find the info on the Gartner Group article.

>>> Doug Becker <[log in to unmask]> 02/12/01 01:29PM >>>
The Gartner Group has an article on this very topic on their web site passed along by http://cobolreport.com/ newsletter this month.

Gartner concludes that the migration to Java will not be quick, easy, or cheap. 

They say that through 2005, a business will spend an amount equal to the salary of a developer to move him or her from COBOL to Java and that they'll have to give a 20% increase in salary to retain them, not to mention the programmer down time and training costs during the transition.

Sounds like a WIN-WIN for the COBOL programmer who is lucky enough to be retrained to be proficient in Java [or is plucky enough to learn to be proficient on their own].