Modernize with confidence
Rewrite what matters, without breaking what works
Is AI a silver bullet for mainframe modernization?
AI improves the economics of modernization; it doesn’t change the risk
A Mechanical Orchard Research Report
What IT leaders really think about legacy modernization.
Three principles
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.
Have a workload in mind?
The system in action is the specification
Recreate its behavior exactly in a modern language
Roll increments into production
Have a workload in mind?
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.
Meet Imogen®
Imogen is Mechanical Orchard's end-to-end mainframe modernization platform. Its core insight: the running system is a better specification than its code. Imogen captures what a system actually does — through real data flows across component interfaces — and uses that behavioral specification to guide AI code generation and prove equivalence at every step.
Unlike conventional approaches that write code first and test later, Imogen inverts the process: we know what the new system must do before we build it, and we verify it continuously as we go.
Imogen Demo from Mechanical Orchard on Vimeo
Our insights
First principles thinking meets legacy modernization.
Backed by 30 years of pioneering software development best practices.
What does Mechanical Orchard do?
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.
How does Mechanical Orchard’s approach to modernization differ from what’s available today?
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.
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.