The dilemma is with people that are stuck in this old technology, and it really is kind of stuck. They don't really understand the new technology, and so it's a gap issue. Those people that would use the tool for more benefit don't really know enough about how to integrate it with the other technologies. The people in the other technologies don't care about your tool. You need that gap filled with CA expertise. CA is supposed to fill that gap and they don’t really do so. They don't really know how to do it, and we don't really know how to take it, to be honest with you. It needs to be figured out. The product is solid, and has been for years and years, and they dabble in new technology. Nobody knows what will be out there tomorrow. Yes, we'd like to address whatever comes out tomorrow and work with that.

They need to re-envision themselves not as a seller of new tool sets, but as a tool set enhancer. To enhance the usage of the tool sets they have. They get big maintenance money from this stuff, so it's not like they're not making any money. You don't need to sell new tool sets to make money. They need to enhance it in terms of connecting, or leveraging, with other technologies. As an example, I work on the State of Texas Medicaid system. A huge part of that's written in COOL:Gen/CA Gen. Using those assets in the portal world, in the Windows world, is really important to be able to leverage all the work you did over here and some of the new stuff you do, and we do, but we do it based on what somebody thinks might work, not on somebody sitting down and saying, "Okay, we understand the .NET, WinGen for .NET, and here's how you do .NET, and here's how WinGen does it, and here's how we expect you to use it. Here's how you can make it better, and work harder.”

The world is changing, the technologies are changing - COOL:Gen needs to change as well. COOL:Gen gives us the opportunity to generate the codes in a variety of technologies. In the future we need some mobile support, mobile generation, and a service oriented application architecture supported.

The product needs to be well marketed, then adopted. I am not seeing many customers using the product.

The weak side is, I cannot use the DB2 specifications, DB2 comments, easily. They should support the latest DB2 versions, the latest DB2 comments. This is my priority. Database access.

I’m very comfortable with the product, but there’s always room for improvement. The alternative is writing in a native language or program, and this is much better. We can write for mainframe applications – we write in CA Gen but generate the code in COBOL, for example. If I look into the native COBOL language it can be more efficient, and CA Gen adds what seems to be some unnecessary lines of code; it’s not an apples to apples comparison.

Nowadays, it's internet and websites, it's very common. I think they have to make this product more and more flexible to use it in the web as well. I think that’s very important for the future.