Bill Hinshaw, Co-Founder & CEO, Cobol Cowboys, A DotCom Magazine Exclusive Interview

The DotCom Magazine Entrepreneur Spotlight Series

About Bill Hinshaw and Cobol Cowboys:

Experienced Founder and CEO with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology industry.

Proven expertise in systems architect, development, integration and support of mainframe software for banking and state government. Experienced in starting companies for software design, development, support and deliverables. Highly skilled in COBOL, CICS, DB2, VSAM, MQ, Assembler and related mainframe and server products.

Expert witness in matters related to systems integration vs. database interfaces. Testified at State of New Jersey Senate Hearings on Unemployment Claims. AI advisory role for debugging & documenting COBOL programs.

Strong business professional — attended Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Indiana. Appointed Director of Data Processing by Governor of Indiana to implement mainframe computer services.

Founded and headquartered in North Texas, Cobol Cowboys provides professionals for legacy COBOL systems and other programming environments. Our name, Cobol Cowboys, was inspired by the movie “Space Cowboys” in which experienced (some retired) astronauts were called back into service to solve a current day problem in outer space.

After researching many published articles (both positive and negative) on the future life of COBOL, we came away with renewed confidence in its continued life in the coming years. Since COBOL is still the programming foundation and under-structure used today in most USA and International companies, we founded Cobol Cowboys in North Texas to provide professionals for legacy COBOL Systems and non-COBOL systems.

This renewed confidence in COBOL is supported by IBM’s strategies to keep COBOL robust and evergreen as a viable programming language today and years to come. These strategies are evidenced by IBM’s continued enhancements which allow COBOL and Java to run together on mainframes and to take advantage of the latest industry-driven database products (such as DB2 and SQL).

Furthermore, COBOL has been enhanced to develop “object oriented” code in addition to its time-proven legacy code still in use today. These and other programming enhancements offered by IBM keep COBOL a state-of-the-art programming solution.

We offer experienced COBOL (and other software) professionals in various vertical markets; including banking, government, insurance, health care, manufacturing, warehousing, transportation and others.