Micro Focus India, an enterprise application services provider, plans to launch its Academy Connections Programme within the next few months for COBOL training. The company plans to partner with several universities and colleges for the programme and will subsidise its products.

COBOL is perceived to be an outdated language and educational institutions scrapped it from their syllabi over eight years ago. However, most of the IT systems across the world were written in COBOL and hence experts in the language are required to maintain and upgrade the systems.

Optimum use of existing IT systems helps to cut costs of upgradation. It also helps to retain critical intellectual property of companies.

“The company’s strategies for this fiscal include launching the academy and customising the delivery model of our products for India,” said Ashish Masand, country manager of Micro Focus India. “We will be also be establishing centres of excellence for COBOL with system integrators. We are in advanced level of discussions with several of them including the top 10 IT players in the country.”