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Accelerate legacy modernization at enterprise scale

Our Mechanical Orchard partnership, where engineering meets AI
Partnerships Back

Rewriting the business outcomes of mainframe modernization 

 

 

Thoughtworks and Mechanical Orchard remove the major risks and uncertainties involved in the journey of modernizing mainframe environments.

 

Our engineering and consulting expertise combines with Mechanical Orchard's Imogen platform, which eliminates the traditional testing and integration period, when most efforts encounter difficulties." or something similar. We want to set the stage for validation and equivalence.

Three defining characteristics of good modernization

Prioritized around what matters to the business

 

Not every system needs to be modernized, or in the same way. Good modernization aligns technical change with business priorities, and focuses on the systems that hold the business back or drive competitive advantage.

Oriented around opportunity, not only cost

 

Modernization is not only about retiring technical debt or cost take-out. Done well, it unlocks the power of AI, new markets, and new offerings, so the return is measured in growth, not just efficiency. 

 

Built to lower the cost of change in perpetuity

 

Modular architectures, automation and clear interfaces let you keep evolving without introducing new fragility or slowing delivery. 

How our combined expertise drives results

Thoughtworks brings

30+ years of deep engineering culture and digital transformation experience, and the AI/works™ platform. We recover the business context buried in legacy systems and govern the change from first understanding through to working software.

Mechanical Orchard brings

The Imogen platform, which automates the process of verifying byte-for-byte behavior as it rewrites systems into modern code. Radically de-risks migration by generating fully equivalent code that’s compliant and production-ready.
Thoughtworks brings

30+ years of deep engineering culture and digital transformation experience, and the AI/works™ platform. We recover the business context buried in legacy systems and govern the change from first understanding through to working software.

Mechanical Orchard brings

The Imogen platform, which automates the process of verifying byte-for-byte behavior as it rewrites systems into modern code. Radically de-risks migration by generating fully equivalent code that’s compliant and production-ready.

A fresh approach to an old problem

We rethought mainframe modernization by looking at the root causes of modernization failures. Imogen eliminates the traditional long tail of integration testing through its focus on system behavior, represented by data inputs and outputs, to create a deterministic harness against which code can be generated. This is complemented by three tenets. 

 

  • Incrementalism. Modernizing in small, manageable steps avoids major disruption and keeps operations stable. Each successful step builds confidence across the organization and earns trust from stakeholders. 

     

  • Replicate what's working first. Replicating a system's behavior exactly respects the decades of business rules encoded in it, and creates a stable, verifiable baseline for AI-based tools. 

     

  • Working software, always. Plans and diagrams help, but working software speaks louder. The clearest sign of progress is code that runs, passes tests and performs reliably in the real world. 

Our key differentiators 

Behavior-first, test-driven replication

We capture all system behavior, not just what the code says the system does, to build a rigorous way to test for equivalence, delivering incredibly fast, production-ready modern code.

AI-accelerated system insight

 

Our combination of AI tools and parsers automate reverse engineering and reveal system behavior, reducing reliance on scarce subject-matter experts and speeding up modernization.

Strategic, business-aligned outcomes

We align modernization with your core business goals, delivering tangible value quickly and focusing on what differentiates you. 

Modernization in production 

 

See the approach at work in real modernizations, on more than one cloud.

AWS

 

A global leader in industrial equipment and services needed to retire a high-risk mainframe running its extended warranty platform, without disrupting operations. Together, using AI/works, AWS and Imogen, we recovered the embedded business logic, validated behavior against the legacy system and replatformed onto AWS in controlled slices.

 

Outcomes

 

• 5 months, down from an 18-month plan

• 80% faster than originally scoped 

• 4 batch jobs moved from mainframe JCL to Python on AWS Batch 

• 3 Db2 schemas moved to PostgreSQL, 1,000+ SQL queries in production

Google Cloud

 

SulAmérica, one of Brazil's largest health and insurance providers, wanted proof it could move off the mainframe safely before committing to the full journey. Over 22 weeks, in our first AI-accelerated mainframe modernization in Latin America, we reproduced its most demanding claims workload as Java on Google Cloud and validated it against real production data. 


Outcomes

 

• 149,000 lines of COBOL across 68 programs reproduced as Java 

• 22 of 41 critical output tables at 100% byte-for-byte equivalence 

• 40% fewer divergent and 70% fewer missing records across runs 

• 600 GB of production data used to validate

How we deliver impact 

Enterprise modernization strategy

 

Strategic assessment and planning for the move from legacy to modern, grounded in real evidence and a budget-ready, phased roadmap.

Enterprise modernization design and build

Design and engineering of cloud-native, API-driven or hybrid solutions, with operational interchangeability proven by Imogen and delivered incrementally. 

Imogen and our AI/works platform work together

Imogen gives the fastest path to audited, production-ready equivalence on the mainframe, and AI/works governs the wider modernization around it.

Delivered the 3/3/3 way

 

A business outcome in three days, a working prototype in three weeks, a production-grade solution in three months.

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Frequently asked questions

  • They are complementary. BRE-based transformation extracts conditional logic to assist with planning but may miss critical implementation details like encoding and runtime handling because they aren't labeled as "business logic". Imogen treats the original system's live behavior as the comprehensive specification, ensuring behavioral equivalence through byte-level verification against production data.

  • We don't copy your code onto new infrastructure or translate it line by line. We replicate how your system behaves and prove the new system matches it against real data, so you modernize the architecture without inheriting the old system's problems. 

  • No. We modernize in small, verified slices and keep operations running. Each slice earns confidence for the next. 

  • They are complementary. Imogen gives the fastest path to audited, production-ready equivalence on the mainframe, and AI/works governs the wider modernization around it. We bring the right combination for your estate. 

  • It is strongest there, where proving equivalence is hardest and the stakes are highest. The same behavior-first method applies to other legacy platforms. 

  • Most start with a focused workshop to find your highest-risk workload and scope a practical, evidence-based path off it. 

Turn legacy into leverage 

 

Start with a scoped workshop. Leave with an investment-ready roadmap grounded in evidence, not a maybe. 

Talk to our team