Modernize in weeks, not years.
Mainframe COBOL, IBM i RPG, Oracle Forms, .NET Framework, and Java monoliths carry decades of undocumented business logic. AlinePage uses multi-agent orchestration to read, explain, refactor, test, and migrate that logic at machine speed — with human review at every material step.
The pressure on legacy is compounding.
Five forces are converging. Any one of them justifies action; together they make delay the highest-risk option.
Talent scarcity
COBOL, PL/I, RPG, Natural, and Assembler specialists are retiring faster than they can be replaced. Documentation is decades out of date, and knowledge lives in the heads of a handful of engineers.
Runaway MIPS cost
Mainframe MIPS pricing, vendor lock-in, and end-of-support hardware create a floor on operating cost that only grows. Every year without a plan costs more than the last.
Integration friction
Mobile, partner APIs, real-time UPI, ABDM, GST portals, and AI copilots need synchronous, event-driven access. Legacy batch and screen-scrape adapters cannot deliver it reliably.
Regulatory audit pressure
DPDP Act 2023, IRDAI, RBI, and SEBI mandates require auditable data flows and field-level encryption — often incompatible with flat-file VSAM architectures.
Agility gap
Nightly batch cycles, quarterly release trains, and change-review boards block digital product velocity. Customer-facing teams cannot ship what the core system cannot support.
Silent resilience risk
Undocumented dependencies, single-point-of-failure batch jobs, and unrecoverable disaster scenarios accumulate quietly for years — until one outage exposes the entire stack.
Months of work compressed into days.
Traditional modernization allocates weeks to each activity because a human has to read, interpret, and document code line by line. Agents do that reading in parallel, at machine speed, with the full codebase in view simultaneously.
Dependency mapping
8–12 weeks → 3–5 days
Repo-wide code intelligence agents produce dependency graphs, call trees, and dead-code maps automatically.
Rule extraction
3–6 months → 1–2 weeks
Agents read COBOL paragraphs and PL/SQL packages, then produce natural-language rule specs that SMEs validate.
Copybook → schema
6–10 weeks → days
Copybook and DDL parsers emit canonical schemas; agents propose target mappings with confidence scores.
Regression suites
months → hours / module
Agents synthesize equivalence tests, edge cases, and golden-record fixtures from legacy behaviour automatically.
Rewrite & port
12–24 months → stream of PRs
Refactor agents propose target-language equivalents module by module. Humans review, not author.
Dual-run verification
weeks → real-time
Reconciliation agents compare legacy and target outputs record by record and surface only true divergences.
What we handle.
The AlinePage modernization practice covers the full spectrum of enterprise legacy — from IBM Z mainframes to abandoned SaaS.
Mainframe
COBOL, PL/I, HLASM, JCL, CICS, IMS DC/DB, DB2 for z/OS, VSAM, GDGs, MQ, CA-7, Control-M, Endevor, Changeman, and 3270 green-screen workflows.
Midrange (AS/400)
RPG III / RPG IV / RPGLE, CL, DDS-defined files, DB2 for i, subfiles, 5250 workstations, and ILE integrated service programs.
Java monoliths
Struts, EJB 2.x, JBoss / WebLogic / WebSphere, XML-RPC, SOAP, on-prem Oracle, and long-lived stateful sessions on aging JDKs.
.NET Framework
ASP.NET WebForms, WCF, MSMQ, SSIS integration services, COM+ components, and Windows Server host dependencies.
Oracle Forms & PL/SQL
Forms 6i / 10g / 12c, Reports, Oracle EBS customizations, PL/SQL packages carrying business logic, and Oracle Workflow deployments.
End-of-life SaaS
Heavily customized SAP ECC, Siebel, Lotus Notes / Domino, PowerBuilder client-server apps, and vendor-abandoned line-of-business tools.
Four phases, clear exit gates.
Each phase produces a decision-ready artifact. Programs can stop, pivot, or continue based on evidence — not sunk cost.
Ingest the estate
Code intelligence agent ingests the codebase, copybooks, JCL, and configs. Produces a dependency graph, rule inventory, complexity heat map, MIPS profile, and a workload-by-workload recommendation across the seven Rs (retain, retire, rehost, replatform, refactor, re-architect, rebuild).
Wrap without touching
Wrap legacy transactions with REST / gRPC APIs. Stream row-level changes from VSAM, IMS, DB2, or Oracle via CDC into Kafka. Modern channels start consuming the wrappers, buying time and reducing MIPS. Nothing on the mainframe changes yet.
Refactor, test, reconcile
Refactor and port agent generates target-language PRs module by module. Test synthesis agent produces the safety net. Reconciliation agent runs in dual-run mode, comparing legacy and target outputs record by record until parity is proven. Humans review a stream of small, verifiable changes.
Retire the legacy
Traffic is fully shifted. Data is archived per retention policy. Runtime is decommissioned. Post-mortem captures lessons for the next portfolio. MIPS savings fund the next wave.
Concrete plays we run against z/OS and IBM i.
Mainframes are the highest-value, highest-risk modernization targets. These are the patterns we apply — not theory.
COBOL code intelligence
Ingest programs, copybooks, JCL, PROCs, and control cards into a semantic graph. Extract business rules paragraph by paragraph. Surface duplicate logic across programs and unreachable paragraphs.
Copybook & DDL to canonical schema
Parse REDEFINES, OCCURS-DEPENDING-ON, and packed-decimal fields. Generate Avro / Protobuf / JSON Schema with type-safe mappings and bidirectional codecs for interoperability during dual-run.
JCL & batch to event-driven
Decompose overnight batch cycles into a job dependency graph. Convert step-by-step JCL into workflows on Airflow, Temporal, or Step Functions. Replace file-based handoffs with Kafka topics and CDC events.
CICS transactions to APIs
Expose BMS map transactions as REST or gRPC endpoints. Wrap 3270 green screens with headless adapters. New channels route through the API while legacy terminals continue to work.
VSAM & IMS to modern stores
Stream changes from VSAM, IMS DB, and DB2 via CDC into PostgreSQL, Aurora, or a lakehouse. Reconciliation agents compare row counts, checksums, and business totals continuously.
DB2 z/OS to PostgreSQL / Aurora
Translate DDL, stored procedures, triggers, and SQL dialect variations. Convert QMF and BMC utilities. Agents flag every non-portable construct and propose target equivalents.
Green screen to agent-first UX
Replace 3270 and 5250 workflows with modern interfaces — chat, web, or agent-driven — while retaining the underlying transaction until the backend catches up.
REXX, CLIST & operator tooling
Rewrite operator scripts, monitoring hooks, and Endevor / Changeman routines into modern CI/CD pipelines with proper version control and blue-green deploys.
MIPS reduction during transition
Route read-heavy workloads to CDC-fed replicas, offload reporting to the lakehouse, and reduce peak MIPS before the mainframe is fully retired — funding the program with its own savings.
What separates us from a generic rewrite shop.
Speed only compounds if the outputs are trustworthy. Every agent decision is bounded, cited, and reviewable.
Agentic, not just LLM
Multi-agent orchestration on LangGraph with explicit plan, verify, and conclude phases. Each agent has a defined role, tool policy, and confidence output — so migrations are traceable, not opaque.
Citation to source
Every extracted rule, generated document, and proposed rewrite cites the exact source file and line. Nothing is invented; nothing is untraceable.
Rollback by design
Strangler-fig routing, dual-run mode, and CDC replays mean every migration step is reversible until the moment of formal cutover.
India-first regulation
DPDP Act 2023, RBI, IRDAI, and SEBI-aligned by design. Data residency in India-region cloud with KMS-encrypted PII throughout the migration.
PR-review workflow
Refactor and port agents open small, single-purpose pull requests. Your team reviews a stream of digestible changes instead of a monolithic rewrite.
Immutable audit trail
Every agent action — who ran it, what it read, what it produced — is written to an immutable log with full replay for regulator and internal audit review.
Pick one workload. Prove the speed.
Start with a single COBOL program, RPG module, or Oracle Forms screen. In two to four weeks you will have the extracted rules, a target implementation, an equivalence test suite, and a live reconciliation dashboard — enough evidence to plan the rest of the portfolio.