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Mechanical Orchard Named a 2025 Gartner® Cool Vendor in AI Code Assistants

via Business Wire
  • We believe this recognition highlights the Company’s more innovative and less disruptive alternative to traditional modernization approaches
  • Follows the recent announcement of the launch of Imogen, the Company’s end-to-end mainframe modernization platform and a partnership with global technology consultancy, Thoughtworks

Legacy modernization company Mechanical Orchard is announcing it has been named a Cool Vendor in the 2025 Gartner® Cool Vendors in AI Code Assistants report, published on 3 June 2025 by Gartner analysts Arun Batchu, Deacon D.K. Wan, Jim Scheibmeir and Nitish Tyagi.

According to the Report, “Software engineering teams responsible for modernizing mission-critical legacy systems face the daunting task of ensuring seamless operational continuity during transformation.”

The Report makes several recommendations, including:

  • “Software engineering teams should deepen their code and systems understanding by harnessing AI code assistants with capabilities that can bring up-to-date and relevant context from enterprise code repositories”
  • “Software engineering leaders and their teams must modernize legacy systems and can do so by utilizing the behavior-first approach to ensure seamless transitions and operational continuity”

“Because legacy modernization is often difficult, risky, and disruptive, most organizations defer addressing it until the cost of change becomes overwhelming—or something breaks.” said Irene Sandler, CMO, Mechanical Orchard. “We think Gartner rightly noted in 2023 that generative AI changes the game, but the hardest part remains: how to trust AI-generated code. Our behavioral, data-capture-based approach focuses on converging AI-generated code to the exact specifications of the system we’re modernizing. We believe it’s great to receive Gartner’s recognition that our approach has the potential to solve some big challenges.”

Mechanical Orchard recently launched its modernization platform, Imogen, which encapsulates the behavior-based approach. Organizations have the flexibility to decide what to update and when without fear of disrupting current operations

The joint mainframe modernization offering with Thoughtworks helps the Company to scale and validates the need for a fresh approach.

The issue of mainframe reliance remains one of the critical unsolved IT challenges in the world today: $13 trillion of the US economy and at least 71% of the Fortune 500 still rely on mainframe systems. The total global addressable market currently stands at $66 billion.

Gartner disclaimer

Gartner, Inc. Cool Vendors in AI Code Assistants. Arun Batchu, Deacon D.K. Wan, Jim Scheibmer and Nitish Tyagi, 3 June 2025.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Mechanical Orchard

Mechanical Orchard develops, licenses, and implements software that changes the way organizations modernize the world’s most critical and complex legacy systems. Founded in October 2022, clients include global retailers, public sector, logistics and consumer packaged goods companies, and investors include GV, Emergence Capital, Fin Capital and MongoDB. Mechanical Orchard is based in San Francisco, CA. Visit www.mechanicalorchard.com for more information.

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