I have been a COBOL programmer for over 13 years and can say that there is still a need for it especially in any application that processes huge volumes of data. In my case I work on a billing application that processes millions of customers with hundreds of millions of charges per month. There is simply no other programming language that can support that volume. There as an effort some time ago to rewrite some of the applications in the billing stream in C++. The COBOL jobs finished in about 3 hours the C++ version was still running two days later. Although there is less need to support mainframe applications there are still us dinosaur programmers out there loving what they do. I am actually doing some work with stored procedures and JAVA now which I am enjoying.

Regarding Mircofocus: Microfocus is similar to MVS COBOL except that it does not run on an MVS Platform. It ties more into PC computing. If you search the web I believe there is a Microfocus demo, at least there was when I was going to school. My understanding is that there is a pretty big difference between MF Cobol and MVS Cobol probably similiar to that between IBMs an MACs.