This document discusses the forces of change facing businesses and information technology (IT) departments. It notes slow economic growth, high debt, unemployment, and budget cuts in the US. It also discusses industry pressures like job cuts, fines, and bankruptcies. The document summarizes IT spending trends and challenges like maintaining legacy systems and skills shortages. It proposes that organizations embrace disruptive technologies like cloud, mobile, analytics and modernize existing applications to address these challenges in a cost-effective way. It introduces Visual COBOL as a tool to help modernize applications to reduce costs and risks while improving development efficiency, skills, and deploying applications to new platforms and architectures like cloud and mobile.