• The ex-VMWare and Pivotal Senior Executive will join the Leadership Team under CEO Rob Mee
• He will be responsible for building an unparalleled customer excellence strategy for large enterprise customers across the globe
• Appointment follows a $24m Series A funding round led by Emergence Capital

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00:01, Tuesday 23 April, San Francisco, CA - Mechanical Orchard, the GenAI-native technology business that modernizes critical legacy applications within Global 2000 companies without disrupting what they’re doing, today announces it has appointed Edward Hieatt as Chief Customer Officer.

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Joining the Executive Leadership Team, Edward will be responsible for cementing and scaling a world-class customer excellence strategy as the business continues to grow its base of large enterprise customers.

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Edward’s experience makes him perfectly positioned to deliver on this mission. A software engineer by background, he joined Pivotal Labs in 2003 when the company was in its infancy. After moving through the engineering ranks, he helped grow the business until its acquisition in 2012. Then, as Pivotal took shape as a developer platform company, he took up the role of SVP Customer Success in 2015, successfully overseeing the rapid expansion of the technical field organization, including managing thousands of staff and hundreds of customers around the world. Edward remained with the business after Pivotal’s IPO and acquisition by VMware, overseeing Customer Experience and Success at VMware Tanzu.

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Edward joins Mechanical Orchard at a significant inflection point for the business. Founded in 2022 by ex-Pivotal Labs founder and CEO, Rob Mee, the company has a mission to ‘tackle the last great IT challenge of legacy modernization’. Using pioneering iterative, AI-enhanced, and reverse engineering approaches, the company safely and effectively moves large enterprises off legacy systems and into the cloud. Its approach significantly reduces risk while leading to radically improved commercial capabilities, including faster speed to market, enhanced research and development capabilities, and easier implementation of new revenue models.

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The company, which counts global logistics firms and multi-billion dollar retailers among customers, announced in February it had raised $24m in a Series A round led by Emergence Capital.

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Commenting on his appointment, Edward said “This mission truly excites me. Freeing critical applications at large enterprises from outdated systems safely and sustainably is one of the biggest unsolved IT challenges. Mechanical Orchard’s revolutionary and refreshingly modern approach is an industry game-changer. The story is only just beginning and I can’t wait to work with such an incredible team to keep writing it.”

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Rob Mee, Mechanical Orchard CEO added “I’ve known Edward a long time, and he is the best in the business. To combine world-class engineering capabilities with deep commercial knowledge and experience in delivering customer excellence is an incredible skill set and one that resonates with our mission of de-risking the task of modernizing legacy systems. This is complex work that requires building deep partnerships with IT leaders who view this challenge as their steepest mountain to climb. Edward will ensure we offer them unmatched support.”

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The issue of mainframe reliance remains one of the critical unsolved IT challenges in the world today: $13 trillion of the US economy and at least 71% of the Fortune 500 still rely on mainframe systems. The total global addressable market currently stands at $66 billion.