According to a press release, Voice Application Hosting innovator Voxeo is taking the future back to the past in a very effective way. One of the enhancements to its Tropo.com API-based development platform is support of the venerable COBOL programming language. While some people may refer to it as spaghetti, Voxeo CEO notes that “COBOL still has more installed lines of code than any other software language.” He accurately adds that “[b]anks, utilities, and other large corporations depend on COBOL for their billing and operations” and that these “legacy programs can immediately become speech enabled without any further effort.”

By looking backward and into the back office, Voxeo breathes new life and new hope to a generation of programmers and developers who thought that lightweight scripting languages with names like Ruby and Groovy had left them in the dust. Opus Research estimates that the number of COBOL programmers (most over 60 years of age) who are ready to speech-enable the front end of complex back office applications outnumber VoiceXML afficionados by a factor of 10. By blowing the dust off old textbooks and programming manuals a reserve army of developers stand ready to try Tropo.

According t o the press release, developers can test the new COBOL interface and sign up for free accounts at Tropo.com.

Categories: Articles