Relian™ Legacy Code Assessment
Know exactly what is in your COBOL estate.
Before any agency can modernize a mainframe, it has to answer one question: what is actually in there? Vendors answer with estimates. Relian answers with measurements — a signed, deterministic inventory of your legacy code that your own team can verify without trusting us.
- From $8,000
- Read-only
- Source never leaves your perimeter
- Orderable nationwide via Montana MAPS
01 — The problem
The code runs the program. Nobody left can read it.
State Medicaid claims systems, eligibility engines, tax platforms, and pension administration still run on COBOL — in some cases on cores federally certified before 1980. The Government Accountability Office has reported critical federal systems running on COBOL and Assembly Language Code with a dwindling number of people available to support them. State modernization assessments describe the same condition: decades-old mainframes and source that is difficult to interpret.
The result is a scoping failure that repeats across the country. An agency cannot describe its own estate precisely enough to price the work, and neither can the vendors bidding on it. Estimates substitute for measurements, scope grows, and schedules slip. A verified inventory changes the economics of every decision that follows it.
4.61s
To inventory a 44-program CICS/IMS/DB2 mainframe application — 329 files, no manual intervention
$8,000
Starting price. Small enough to procure without committing to a modernization program
4
Independent verification layers on the delivered report, each failing separately and by name
0
Lines of your source code sent to any generative-AI model, at any stage
02 — What the assessment delivers
Six measurements a program office can budget against.
01 // INVENTORY
Program & file manifest
Every COBOL program, copybook, and artifact on the tree, each with a SHA-256 digest, under a manifest hash that identifies the codebase independent of its file path.
02 // COVERAGE
Portfolio construct coverage
The measured share of statements across the estate falling inside a supported, deterministic migration path. Measured — not projected.
03 // SCOPE
Quotable-today code lines
Code lines carrying no blocking construct. This is the defensible basis for scoping and pricing a migration — the number a contracting officer can hold a vendor to.
04 // COST DRIVER
Lines requiring grammar expansion
Code lines carrying at least one construct outside the supported set. The honest cost driver that most assessments leave out of the summary.
05 // RISK
Per-program & portfolio tiering
A published, deterministic tiering rule applied to measured inputs — with the specific rule that fired named in the report, not hidden behind a score.
06 // DIAGNOSIS
Blocking construct inventory
Which specific verbs and constructs prevent automated migration, named to the line. This is what turns a red status into an actionable work package.
03 — How it is different
Four commitments, enforced in the engine — not in the marketing.
Measured or absent.
NEVER ESTIMATEDEvery quality figure is produced by a process that ran during your assessment, or it is reported as not measured. No constants, no defaults, no formulas standing in for observations. An unmeasured metric returns null by construction, and the attestation layer refuses to sign unmeasured values.
Verifiable without trusting us.
FOUR INDEPENDENT LAYERSThe report ships with a manifest of digests, an instance signature generated on your machine, and a Visionblox countersignature. The verification tool prints its own SHA-256 on every run so you can confirm you are running what we delivered, and our key fingerprint is re-derivable by you from public material alone.
Your source stays yours.
ZERO EGRESSThe assessment runs read-only, on-premises or by CLI inside your environment. No customer source code is transmitted to any generative-AI model at any stage. The hosted platform stores Visionblox artifacts only. No new data-exposure surface, no new privacy review.
Honest refusal is a feature.
NO PLACEHOLDER OUTPUTWhere a program falls outside the supported path, the tool issues a diagnosed refusal naming the construct and the line. It emits no approximate output and issues no attestation — including on a program that is 93% transpilable, because 93% is not 100%. A tool that fails cleanly is the only kind whose successes mean anything.
04 — Proven on real mainframe code
Run against public mainframe codebases. Results published as found.
Each run below executed with no per-codebase configuration, no hand-editing of output, and no re-runs to produce a better answer. Two of the three are real mainframe applications carrying CICS, IMS, and DB2.
| Codebase | Scale | Wall time | Portfolio risk | Quotable today | Needs grammar work |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Mainframe Modernization CardDemoCICS / IMS / DB2 | 44 programs329 files | 4.61 s | BLOCKED | 20,224 lines | 2,680 lines |
| Open Mainframe ProjectCOBOL Programming Course | 30 programs360 files | 0.95 s | BLOCKED | 2,378 lines | 361 lines |
| GnuCOBOL | 7 programs406 files | 1.73 s | BLOCKED | 5,561 lines | 200 lines |
A BLOCKED result is the product working correctly. These are real mainframe estates. The engine reported them as blocked for full automated migration and named the constructs responsible, rather than returning a favorable coverage figure. An assessment that returns a good number on a difficult estate is worse than no assessment, because a program office will budget against it.
05 — Engagement
Start with the map. The map scopes everything after it.
PHASE 1
Legacy Code Assessment
Read-only inventory and construct analysis. Signed, verifiable report delivered in days. No changes to your systems, no production access required.
From $8,000
PHASE 2
Modernization roadmap
A scoped migration plan derived from Phase 1 measurements — sequencing, workstreams, risk register, and a cost basis you can defend in a budget hearing.
Fixed price, scoped from Phase 1
PHASE 3
Modernization delivery
Systems integration execution against the roadmap, delivered by the team behind Epic/HL7 patient portal infrastructure and the California DHCS MITA reporting system.
T&M · Cost-plus · FFP
Phase 1 is deliberately structured as a small, self-contained purchase. It is designed to be procurable without committing your agency to a modernization program — and the artifact it produces belongs to you. Take it to any vendor.
06 — Scope of claim
What we do not claim.
Stated here because an evaluator should not have to discover it in a clarification round.
Relian migration engine — development status
- Relian’s automated migration engine is in active development. It has no completed production migrations and no production customers.
- Its supported deterministic migration path covers a COBOL-85 subset. No claim is made regarding automated translation of CICS, VSAM, JCL, copybooks, or embedded SQL.
- No claim is made for any language pair other than COBOL.
- Semantic preservation, branch coverage, and defect-density figures in the Relian benchmark are committed targets defined in advance of solution work — not achieved results, and are not represented as such.
- The layout engine is verified against GnuCOBOL 3.1.2.0. No equivalence with IBM Enterprise COBOL is claimed or implied.
- The assessment capability described on this page is measured, executed, and independently verifiable today. That distinction is maintained deliberately throughout.
Build what doesn’t exist yet
If you own a COBOL estate, the first question is not who migrates it.
It is what is actually in there. We answer that in days, for $8,000, with a report your team can verify without trusting us — and that you keep regardless of who does the work.
Khaalis Wooden, MBADirector of Enterprise Capture & Compliance