Do not know about our competitors but you can run our product for free on a raspberry pi if you just want to play around.
With microfocus JCL become bash scripts and have similar tools to mainframe. Unsure if lzlabs translates jcls.
My favorite unanswered question when someone told me take the 70.000 component core banking to cloud is “ok, on which language you can assure will run in 10-15 years?” As that’s the bare minimum the new CBS has to last.
If we had followed the crowd, we would have built it as microservices, then as event-driven architecture, then as Mini-monoliths, on auto generated Java that turns one cobol program into an object but is not designed as an OO platform…
I understand companies should not be tied to the past but running off a precipice full speed on is not smart either…
Perl 5.
Also consider that Linux allows more flexible IPC so some batch can be simplified dramatically