In case anyone is wondering if something like this could ever be the "killer app" of COBOL that launches it into modern fame and glory, the answer is "oh god, no."
COBOL isn't a modern language by any stretch of the imagination. For example, advanced math is something that it's particularly bad at. Or do you want to sort some data? Yeah, COBOL will let you sort some data, only if you specify the damned file containing the unsorted data, the file that will hold the data while it's being sorted, the file that will contain the sorted data (http://www.tutorialspoint.com/cobol/cobol_internal_sort.htm). Want to sort an array into another array? Screw you.
However, there's one thing that COBOL is very bad at: unstructured text. Guess what 99% of the Web is?
For example, in their sample code they show this in the working storage section:
01 the-values.
05 COW-query-values occurs 10 times.
10 COW-query-value-name pic x(90).
10 COW-query-value pic x(90).
Thus, when someone else declares color as "pic x(80)" (note the 80 versus 90), even if the color submitted is "blue" for each, one might be 80 characters long and the other might be 90 characters long and if you don't like it, too bad. Have fun comparing them.
COBOL is still the world's most popular programming language, though, if you look at it in terms of lines of code. Sadly, COBOL programmers are aging and there are fewer devs to maintain their programs (I started hacking on COBOL when I was 30 and I was the youngest developer in my department!).