First off, the acronym is CoBOL, for Common Business Oriented Language. For thoses with snark about JAVA/Java...
Now, I'm pretty sure that, when most enterprises big or small set out to write new things these days, they're not including CoBOL in the implementation trade space. Yes, you can do a lot of things with the language that the originators didn't contemplate (I wrote a linked list program in my undergrad endeavor), but why hurt yourself in the process? The Indiana Jones knife-vs-gun scene comes to mind.
What's going on now is that, in the world, a bit of critical business logic is captured and exercised in the name of CoBOL, and folks saddled with it are afraid of messin' with what works for two reasons:
1. Afraid of not translating it completely in the new implementation, and not discovering that until the customer sees the result.
2. Afraid of differences in processing in the underlying tools that won't be identified until after the customer sees the result.
Notice the 'customer' in each of these fears. Some endeavors don't cotton to customer beta testing...
So, until 1) compelling business cases can be made for conversion, and 2) the risk of migration to something newer/better/sexier can be effectively communicated and managed, usually by folk who don't understand software, stuff like CoBOL will persist.