We’re ending legacy modernization as we know it—and ushering in a world of iterative, modular, and blazingly fast innovation.
What IT Leaders really think about legacy modernization.
If it’s not working, do something different.
We rapidly rewrite what’s working today into a modern form that’s ready for anything you want it to do tomorrow.
Legacy modernization is the key to staying competitive, secure, and innovative—but too often, these projects derail under the weight of complexity and risk. The result? Disruptions, soaring costs, and unfinished transformations that leave businesses stuck in the past.
Mechanical Orchard is building technology that modernizes systems based on how they behave. Guided by three core principles, it makes modernization safe, fast, and disruption-free.
We believe that every company deserves to realize their vision, free of constraints from the past. Our team's approach, technology, and experience can help them move into this evolving version safely, reliably, fearlessly.
Mechanical Orchard is a legacy modernization technology company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. We apply AI-enhanced tools and disciplined methods to continuously modernize, operate, and innovate on critical business applications, especially those on mainframes, allowing our customers to regain their ability to innovate and win in their markets again with the least risk possible.
Not exactly. Take mainframes, for example: 71 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on mainframes as their systems of record. This means mainframes support roughly US$13 trillion of revenue each year, half of the entire US GDP of US$25 trillion (2022). Every time you bank, purchase an item online for delivery, or book travel, you’re likely interacting with a mainframe.
Many of the world’s most successful corporations run on older systems that, though they work, constrain their ability to respond and adapt. Mechanical Orchard sets companies up to be able to genuinely innovate in the cloud through a different approach. Common approaches today have several drawbacks:
Migrating the legacy code “as-is” to the cloud postpones the problem: the code is still old, the constraints still exist, and the skill set keeping it going is still fading because the people who understand it are leaving the workforce.
Converting the legacy code to a “modern” language using automated tooling simply rewrites code that few human beings understand, into machine-generated code that now nearly no one does. Ignoring the context surrounding the code—the people who use it and the other systems that interact with it—creates further constraints and delays usability.
Overhauling the entire legacy code and reimagining it from scratch may sound compelling but imposes serious risks: it involves interfering with multiple dimensions of your critical system simultaneously, without knowing if everything will work until the very end. This could mean massive delays, offline systems, unanticipated costs, extended timelines, even changes of management potentially.
Mechanical Orchard understands the behaviors of a system and its interdependencies with other systems, dissects each component to clearly define its purpose and how it works, and delivers modern code incrementally into the cloud. The result is a critical system that is now on a malleable and modern foundation, one that keeps all the essential functions you need, and none of the layers of old workarounds and outdated adaptations that you don’t.
As our former Chief Scientist, Kent Beck, puts it: “First make the change easy, then make the easy change.” It might sound counterintuitive, but we believe the fastest and safest way to get to where you want to go is by rewriting what’s already working. And since we deliver incrementally, you can start innovating on each slice as soon as it’s modernized.
Companies that are looking to the cloud for a competitive edge are ideal. This is less about running away from legacy system and their constraints, and more about running toward the boundless opportunities available once existing constraints disappear. Our iterative approach, grounded in always-working software, means that even critical workflows can begin migrating onto the cloud in weeks, not years, and without ever having to go offline. Organizations can capture market shifts and opportunities quickly and elegantly, and accelerate or decelerate as timing, executive support, and market cycles allow.
The beauty of our approach is that it creates a replica in the cloud of a particular workload based on its data flows across component interfaces. Because we can capture sufficiently representative data flows into and out of a given component, we can treat the component itself as a black box and reproduce its behavior in any language. Language choice, either source or target, doesn’t matter.
Continuous modernization means continuous delivery: that’s how we reduce risk and get workflows in production faster. That means we need to run the system while we incrementally modernize it until the entire system is migrated. During that time, customers benefit from a finely-tuned, test-driven, automated cloud environment that is doing everything the mainframe did, with the same performance and functionality—except more and more components are running on modern code. When the modernization of the system is complete, customers can pair in with us and learn and/or take over anytime — the company retains the intellectual property and maintains control.
Mechanical Orchard is a legacy modernization technology company that rewrites the world’s most complex and critical enterprise applications, especially those that have resisted modernization in the past. Our disciplined methodology eliminates the risks, failures, and disruptions that have typified the modernization process by continually delivering early, continuous, and incredibly rapid proof of progress. Organizations can regain the ability to innovate, experiment, and respond to market opportunities quickly and elegantly.
Mechanical Orchard is ideal for organizations with legacy systems that form the core of their competitive advantage—the software that embodies their differentiators and represents important intellectual property. These organizations:
We offer a safe, non-disruptive way to modernize these systems that gives organizations the agility to evolve without compromising their operations.
Mechanical Orchard is changing the thankless nature of legacy modernization by changing the approach: turning modernization from a fraught, expensive, and risky effort into a straightforward, iterative process that proves success frequently and consistently so organizations can adapt whenever they need to, easily, economically, and quickly.
We are refactoring and incrementally rewriting. This is often considered the gold standard of modernization but typically has taken far too long to complete in part because both efforts cannot traditionally been done in parallel. Our approach makes it possible to refactor and incrementally rewrite simultaneously while maintaining exceptional software quality.
Imogen is our end-to-end modernization platform designed especially for mainframe systems. It removes risk and disruption while dramatically accelerating the modernization process. Its name is derived from our command line prompt: % mo gen (go on, say it out loud!).
Unlike traditional approaches that rely on manual rewrites, code conversion tools, or big-bang transformation efforts, Imogen provides a complete system for safely and reliably rewriting mainframe applications one workload at a time into high-quality, maintainable, and idiomatic cloud-native languages.
The vast majority of mainframe modernization efforts today focus on code rather than the behavior of the system. System integrators usually transpile code into a modern language (or often simply lift and shift old code into the cloud), and then integrate and test the output afterwards. This integration and testing stage is often longer than the original transformation stage; worse, success or failure is highly uncertain until the very end.
Imogen differs in three important ways:
Yes. We rewrite the entire application or system into cloud-native, idiomatic, easily maintainable code that exactly replicates the existing behavior. This gives you a “fresh start” without disrupting the current flow of business and resets the technical debt meter. And we do so slice by slice, in a way that avoids any disruption.
As our former Chief Scientist, Kent Beck, puts it: “First make the change easy, then make the easy change.” It might sound counterintuitive, but we believe the fastest and safest way to get to where you want to go is by rewriting what’s already working (and eliminating what’s not). And since we deliver incrementally, you can start innovating on each slice as soon as it’s modernized.
While the Imogen platform is optimized for mainframes, the beauty of our approach is that it can work with any kind of legacy system: we treat the system itself as a black box and reproduce its behavior from any language, to any language.
We do. Because Imogen captures data inputs and outputs, it’s able to generate high-quality, idiomatic modern code that’s built and verified rapidly against the actual run-time data of the application. This eliminates the long and uncertain period of “testing and integration” that often results in project failures.
We currently partner with Thoughtworks, a global technology consultancy with deep roots in the agile software development movement. While we are open to conversations, we do not have a formal licensing offer for other system integrators at this time.
