Hieatt: Pivotal Labs Never Solved Modernizing 1960s–1970s Mainframe Systems
Edward Hieatt · Unlocking Legacy Systems: Modernizing Mainframes via AI with Mechanical Orchard · Jun 13, 2025 · at 2:00
Edward Hieatt is Chief Customer Officer at Mechanical Orchard. He explains why Pivotal Labs founder Rob Mee started Mechanical Orchard to tackle legacy enterprise mainframe modernization.
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“But this problem of the very oldest, you know, I'm talking about systems from the sixties, seventies we never really cracked that at pivotal. So he wanted to come back to that and revisit it and make a company just about that, dedicated to that problem of modernizing, let's call it mainframe and mainframe era systems.”
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“There's an estimate from Gartner that there are between 257 hundred and fifty billion lines of COBOL in the world running in production, right? If you can imagine, like, some dollar per line of code fee on average, right, that, that's a big term.”