A smarter, better way to modernize
Future-proof banking systems—without disruption
Rock, meet hard place
Mainframe systems are often rigid and costly to maintain. Banks face mounting complexity, compliance pressures, and constraints—yet modernization efforts often risk high-profile failure.
Recreate and Deliver
Based on our learnings, we build a perfect replica of this component in a secure cloud environment where it’s subject to rigorous performance and functional criteria before it goes live. Now this component is modern, tested, instrumented and well understood. Most importantly, it’s ready for innovation—while running smoothly with the rest of the legacy system.
Repeat and Innovate
The process iterates with the next component until the entire system has deployed into the cloud environment. Each subsequent component could take progressively less time through applying our AI tools and organizational learnings.
Because we only work with a single component at a time, each one has a proven fallback method. This profoundly limits the risk to your living, breathing system at any given time.
Change the approach, change the odds
Mechanical Orchard’s Imogen modernization platform rewrites aging banking applications into modern, cloud-ready systems—without breaking what already works. Our incremental and speedy process helps banks move faster, and avoids the long delays and failures of traditional modernization approaches.
About Imogen®
The conventional modernization model relies on large teams, a patchwork of vendor tools, some of which use AI, and a sequence of phases — analysis, code transpilation, then a long, uncertain stretch of integration and regression testing. After what are often years of effort, success hinges on a single, high-stakes moment to see if everything actually works. Most of the time, it doesn't.
Instead of focusing on code, Imogen captures how individual workloads actually behave — through real data flows — and rewrites that behavior into modern code. By creating a rapid loop of generation and validation against actual production data as each workload is rewritten, Imogen eliminates the long, uncertain integration phase that has defined — and derailed — conventional modernization efforts.
Rather than applying generative AI directly to code translation, Imogen first builds a precise behavioral specification from the running system, then applies a closed loop of rapid code generation and verification against those specifications. The result is software that is audit-quality, idiomatic, and genuinely ready for what comes next — not just syntactically modern.
While the methodology works for any legacy system, our data capture technology is optimized to automate the modernization process for the following mainframe technologies.
Legacy Technologies:
- OL
- Easytrieve
- PL/1
- Assembler
- CICS
- IMS
- ISAM
- IDMS DB
- DB2
- VSAM
- IDMS ADS
Banks regain the flexibility to adapt, launch new products, and improve operations without the often fraught and unpredictable big, "digital transformation" initiatives.
Beyond Resilience in Banking
At the London book launch for the latest book from Leda Glyptis, Ph.D., leaders on the front lines of banking transformation share their views.
Our insights
The Kitty Hawk moment that changed legacy modernization
blog by Rob Mee, April 3, 2025