8.5 End of Service Plans/Cobol V5 Requirements

[DEE OTT]

​I know that no end of service or end of life has been announced yet for Gen 8.5.   It feels like it has been longer than normal or is possible coming in the new future.  I am curious if that is true or if maybe BROADCOM's approach to new versions and end of life for previous versions will be any different than what we were used to with CA.  Not that I am hoping for an EOS announcement, just sort of curious.  :)

We also haven't upgraded to COBOL 5 yet so we were wondering if that was going to be a requirement when it does come time to upgrade or if older versions of COBOL will continue to be supported with the new versions.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.  I understand that nothing is official until it is announced and published on the Support Lifecycle Dates page.

Thanks!
Dee

[DEE OTT]

I just heard that COBOL 5 has gone end of Marketing and will be end of support 4/30/2020 and that COBOL 4.2 has been announced out of service 9/30/2021 so I guess you can disregard the COBOL part of my question as we will be upgrading straight to COBOL 6.2 sometime before 9/30/2021.  

 

Dee Ott

I/S Billing and Payments Developer – Contingent Worker

 

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[Lynn Williams]

Hi @DEE OTT,
The plans for Gen 8.5 End Of Service/Support were covered in the CA Gen Product Webcast back in January "CA Gen 2019 Update – January 29, 2019 ". See Q&A start ~ 18 minutes in:
https://community.broadcom.com/mainframesoftware/viewdocument/replay-ca-gen-2019-update-janua?CommunityKey=4182c217-4789-4997-8f22-87de25983f6e&tab=librarydocuments​
In summary when "Gen 8.6 Complete" is released (planned for release in the next few months) the Gen 8.5 End Of Service date will be officially announced at the same time and ~18 months notice will be given.
@Su Brude maybe able to add more up to date information.

I hope that helps

Regards,

Lynn​

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Senior Principal Support Engineer
Broadcom
Australia
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[DEE OTT]

Thanks Lynn!  I had planned to listen but then got busy and forgot so thanks for the link and the info!

 

Dee Ott

I/S Billing and Payments Developer – Contingent Worker

 

[Teresa Bredenkamp]

Dee, 

I hope this info about Gen and COBOL is useful.  COBOL allows for a mix of COBOL programs/executables to call each other. COBOL 4.x, COBOL 5.x and COBOL 6.x can co-exist and are supported by Language Environment  (LE).  

What this means for CA Gen is that not all generated code has to be compiled with the same version of COBOL and the same applies to Gen runtime. Gen 8.6 was built with COBOL V5.1.1 but applications can be built with any version of COBOL supported by IBM. This refers to Compilers.
Execution is dependent on LE support and at this time IBM supports various versions of COBOL runtimes. 

At this time I cannot say when CA Gen runtime will be (re)built with a new COBOL Compiler but we are aware of EOS for third party products. As CA Gen moves to a Continuous Delivery model, we will be in a position to be more flexible to do necessary changes. It is our goal to let our customers know about any such changes as soon as we possibly can.     

Regards

Teresa