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modern foundation, one that keeps all the essential functions you need, and none of the layers of old workarounds and outdated adaptations that you don’t.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.