Hewlett-Packard Corp., Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp. are plying a middle way for service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace mainframe COBOL applications.

IBM, which is the vendor for most of the mainframe hardware and software that falls into this category, still insists that the mainframe can be a viable component in SOA. Recently Dave Locke, director for IBM Rational worldwide marketing strategy, said: "There's tons of good working programming on mainframes. Almost all of it is in COBOL with some in PL/1 and other languages. There are some 200 billion lines of COBOL. It's been said that if we replaced all that COBOL it would cost $20 trillion."

But rivals HP, Oracle and Intel with their Application Modernization Imitative (AMI) are not planning to replace all 200 billion lines of COBOL, just the business critical parts that can become part of an SOA implementation.