Like the COBOL programmers who coded their original applications decades ago, mainframes are showing their age but still do useful tasks in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation at the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation (BWC).

While almost all new SOA development at the largest exclusive state-fund workers' compensation system in the U.S. is done in .NET, Stacy Pickett, software architect for Entarco USA Inc., an enterprise architecture consultancy, said mainframes still play a part. He is focused on the data services portion of the SOA implementation at BWC and most of the data relating to more than $19 billion in assets is in mainframe IBM DB2 databases interacting with COBOL applications and using CICS.

In the SOA implementation the DB2 data is need by .NET applications that provide it as services that update the status of workers' compensation policies and claims for employers and workers accessing the information via standard Web browsers, Pickett explained.