Since our launch two years ago, we have kept our focus on building a fresh approach to an old problem.

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My time growing Pivotal exposed me daily to the status quo of modernizing legacy systems. Ultimately, organizations mold themselves to their technology; historically, this has been very messy, both technically and culturally, to unwind. Traditional modernization approaches, while attractive on paper, have often proved to be highly risky, deeply opaque—and largely a false economy. What was supposed to be a problem solver only increased technical debt and led to more complexity.

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We also know from countless conversations with customers and prospects that those with the unenviable task of leading these projects felt reticent, disillusioned and understandably fearful of the result. An industry worth billions of dollars, invested in always keeping something broken, only perpetuates the cycle.

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We knew there had to be a better way.

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Our approach significantly reduces the risk of failure in the modernization process, and the cost of change afterwards. Unlike many traditional methods, we focus on the behavior of the system, rather than the code itself. We use a modular, iterative methodology to rewrite the living, breathing system in a modern, cloud-compatible language that’s ready for AI. Once we prove audit-level behavioral parity, we cut it over into production and decommission its legacy counterpart, incrementally and without stress. This approach radically reduces the risk of migration and gives the organization back its ability to build for the future.

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Our approach was consistently producing high quality outcomes with minimal risk on deeply entrenched, critical legacy systems. The only missing piece was speed.

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Late last year, we experienced a breakthrough: our “Kitty Hawk” moment. We knew we had unlocked something truly remarkable, unique, and nothing short of an industry-defining development for enterprise legacy modernization.

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We had worked out how to harness the power of generative AI and build trust in its capabilities—tuning our platform to rapidly develop and validate AI-generated code so that it’s accurate, well-factored and ready to deploy to the cloud. We can now speedily reconstruct the behavior of the system from real data flows, rewriting components piece by piece into modern, idiomatic and innovation-ready code. The output is game-changing: low risk, incremental, continuous modernization, at lightning speed.

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So, today we launch Imogen, our end-to-end modernization platform that neatly encapsulates this holistic approach in a platform that rewrites mainframe applications safely and quickly, with total transparency over the process. We are also announcing global technology consultancy, Thoughtworks, as our first partner in a joint offering focused on modernizing mainframes. Our shared agile heritage and philosophy of incremental modernization makes this a natural fit, and we now have significant potential to reach many of the 70% of Fortune 500 companies still using mainframes.

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Finally, a few thank-yous. My team is undoubtedly one of the most talented and ambitious in the world, but one that is grounded in our shared values of doing what works and what’s right, while being kind to each other. To say I am proud of them is an understatement. And thank you to all our partners and investors who support us every step of the way.

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This is getting very exciting.

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Rob