Mainframe migrations often hit the latency wall—perfect functional translations that are factors slower due to network overhead. Heirloom’s enhanced transpilers solve this by recognizing performance patterns, not just business logic, preserving both meaning and operational characteristics in cloud environments.
AWS’s CLOUD Act defense inadvertently reveals they can access customer data when technically feasible. Despite sovereignty agreements, 20,000+ surveillance requests and academic research show “sovereign” clouds offer limited protection, making platform-independent modernization essential for regulatory flexibility and business resilience.
The CLOUD Act prevents US cloud providers from guaranteeing European data sovereignty, as Microsoft’s Carniaux recently admitted regarding French citizen data. This regulatory complexity highlights why mainframe modernization strategies need platform-agnostic deployment capabilities rather than single-vendor lock-in solutions.
Most modernization projects fail by attempting massive rewrites. Heirloom’s proven two-stage approach delivers immediate cost savings through replatforming, then enables long-term maintainability through semiotic refactoring—preserving business logic while eliminating risk for enterprise customers.
European organizations need data sovereignty and mainframe modernization, but platform-dependent solutions prevent migration to sovereign clouds. Heirloom’s proven mainframe application modernization technology enables rapid, low-risk deployment to every platform including sovereign platforms like STACKIT, OVHcloud & Tietoevry, achieving compliance and cost reduction.
European organizations need data sovereignty and mainframe modernization, but platform-dependent solutions prevent migration to sovereign clouds. Heirloom’s proven mainframe application modernization technology enables rapid, low-risk deployment to every platform including sovereign platforms like STACKIT, OVHcloud & Tietoevry, achieving compliance and cost reduction.
Legacy code translation isn’t just syntax conversion—it’s theory reconstruction. Using the ‘Chimp Paradox’ framework, we explore how AI systems need three coordinated components (fast pattern-matching, careful analysis, and stored knowledge) to preserve the business logic hidden in decades-old COBOL programs.
Why translating legacy code is really about reconstructing lost theories. Most translation projects fail because they focus on syntax and ignore the business logic in programmers’ heads—here’s how semiotics can solve the real challenge.
Mainframe modernization projects often fail because they focus only on technical, operational, and cultural challenges—while missing the fourth dimension: semiotics. Decades of institutional wisdom are embedded in legacy code, and preserving this meaning is the key to truly successful modernization.
ISG has named Heirloom Computing the multi-platform Leader for Mainframe Application Modernization Software in its 2025 Quadrant Report. Our technology modernizes mainframe workloads to native Java applications deployable on every cloud platform—on-premise, any cloud, or IBM Z.