Mainframe

U.S. Based

Vetted Employee Consultants

Years of Dev Experience

Company-Wide Consultant Average

Years With Keyhole

Average Employee Tenure

Mainframe Modernization Consulting

Modernize legacy mainframe applications with Keyhole Software. Reduce costs, improve agility, and enable new capabilities like AI and cloud computing with our proven modernization consulting services.

Advisory & PoC Services

Comprehensive architectural assessments and actionable roadmaps with Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) to minimize risks and validate strategies.

Application Development

Building custom web, desktop, or mobile .NET applications from start to finish or extending existing apps with new features that meet your requirements.

Code Transformation & Application Migration:

Streamlined re-platforming for rapid deployment, including COBOL-to-Java or COBOL-to-C# migrations using advanced syntax tree tools.

Cloud enablement

Transition to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud platforms and optimize for serverless or container-based architectures.

Why Modernize Mainframe Applications?

Mainframes were designed to provide high availability of mission-critical applications, where downtime would be simply unacceptable. Mainframes have anchored industries such as logistics, banking, insurance, healthcare, and retail—all of which require heavy-duty low latency transaction processing. This is a common business need. But time has changed from 1972 and its Model 204. Today's powerful landscape of software options to ensure modern solutions meet business requirements.

Mainframe Pain Points

Benefits To Expect After Modernizing Your Mainframe

Modernizing legacy systems addresses the performance issues that plague COBOL-based applications:

Improved Throughput: Transitioning to modern platforms like microservices or cloud-native architectures allows systems to process high volumes of messages or transactions without bottlenecks.
Enhanced Reliability: Modern frameworks and technologies offer built-in tools for monitoring, logging, and error recovery, minimizing the risk of cascading failures.
Real-Time Processing: Adopt real-time data processing to meet the increasing demand for instant insights and faster transaction handling.

Modernization ensures your systems are equipped to scale dynamically as your business grows:

Horizontal Scaling: Unlike the vertical limits of legacy systems, modern solutions embrace horizontal scaling—adding more servers or containers to distribute the load seamlessly.
Cloud-Native Scalability: Leverage the elasticity of cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, which scale up or down based on demand.
Future-Proof Infrastructure: Adopt containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) to enable rapid resource provisioning and capacity expansion.

Modern architectures transform painful, monolithic deployment processes into seamless, agile workflows:

Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD): Implement modern DevOps practices to automate testing, integration, and deployment, reducing downtime and manual intervention.
Decoupled Components: Transition to microservices architectures, enabling independent deployment of services without affecting the entire system.
Faster Time-to-Market: Efficient deployment pipelines ensure quicker feature releases and updates to respond to market demands.

Modernizing your systems ensures access to a broader talent pool and reduces reliance on outdated expertise:

Skilled Workforce: Languages like Java, Python, and JavaScript are widely taught and used, making it easier to hire and train engineers.
Community Support: Modern technologies have active developer communities, extensive documentation, and a wealth of third-party tools for troubleshooting and innovation.
Knowledge Retention: With modern systems, businesses can onboard new developers faster and rely less on retiring engineers with specialized knowledge.

Modernizing your legacy COBOL systems isn’t just about solving current challenges—it’s about preparing your business for the future. With increased agility, better scalability, and a larger talent pool, you can respond faster to changing markets and innovate with confidence.

Take the first step toward modernization today! Contact Keyhole Software for a personalized consultation.

Recent Legacy Thought Leadership

At Keyhole Software, we’re passionate about equipping enterprises with the knowledge and strategies needed to modernize legacy COBOL and mainframe systems effectively. With decades of experience in transforming mission-critical applications, our thought leadership in this domain serves as a trusted resource for organizations navigating the challenges of modernization.

Modernizing Cobol Applications

What is Mainframe Modernization & How Can My Business Benefit From It?

White Paper: COBOL Modernization Strategy with Spring Batch

View More Modernization Articles

Modernization Approach Snapshot
Re-Platforming

How Re-Platforming Works

Re-platforming involves analyzing legacy code bases, such as COBOL, to identify grammatical structures or code patterns. These patterns are then used to guide an automated transformation process. The legacy code is passed through a single or multi-step compiler-compiler software, converting it into a modern language like Java, C#, or other equivalents.

This approach focuses on achieving a functional equivalent of the original system in a modern environment, with minimal disruption to existing operations.

Pitfalls

Re-platforming as a modernization strategy that can effectively address the challenges of updating a significant number of mainframe applications. While this approach offers distinct advantages, it also requires careful consideration of potential pitfalls.

Pros

Instead of staffing up teams of product owners and developers to gradually re-write each of the legacy code bits in a new language—all heavy lifting occurs by couple of button pushes. This is a short-term budgetary win-win.

Analysis provides valuable insight. Most clients end up reducing their code base to be converted by 10-25% just through the analysis activity.

Cons

Code translation does not necessarily fix technical debt, and running != performing.

In some cases, these legacy apps potentially have 20+ years of bad or mainframe-specific decisions baked into code.

All the translation process will give you is those potential code landmines now in a newer language that may not benefit from the mainframe’s horsepower.

Syntax Tree Transformer

If you ensure your team understands the limitations of this approach and select a robust, grammar-based tool (like our Keyhole open-source Syntax Tree Transformer and Parser), you can achieve a very predictable result that can get you budgetary and time wins.

See the resource Adventures In Modernization: Strategy & Example Converting COBOL To Java by Dallas Monson to learn more:

See An Example

Recent Mainframe-Related Projects

Legacy mainframe applications, while reliable, often restrict business growth due to inefficiencies and limited adaptability. At Keyhole Software, we specialize in modernizing these systems to unlock agility, cost savings, and innovation. See some recent projects:

Why Businesses Trust Keyhole

Expertise Without Ego

With 17+ years of average experience, our U.S.-based, full-time employee consultants deliver expert services without the ego.

Consistent Results Strengthens Loyalty

78% of our projects last year were with repeat clients, reflecting the trust we've earned by consistently delivering quality and exceeding expectations.

Team Stability & Reliable Partnerships

With an average tenure of 5+ years with Keyhole, the relationship clients develop with our consultants ensures project continuity & deep project knowledge.