Rob Mee

Rob Mee is founder and CEO of Mechanical Orchard, which he started in 2022 to move large companies' mainframe systems to the cloud. Before that he founded Pivotal Labs, the software consultancy known for extreme programming and test-driven development, and later ran Pivotal Software.

Pivotal Labs and Cloud Foundry

“It was only natural that I would pursue a career in software engineering, and from there, I founded Pivotal Labs,” he told Pulse 2.0. EMC bought Pivotal Labs in 2012, and a year later it was spun out as Pivotal Software, which built Pivotal Cloud Foundry. “We helped Global 2000 companies and government agencies modernize their software development capabilities and deploy mission-critical systems to the cloud,” he said.

Reverse engineering the mainframe

Mainframes were the piece Pivotal never moved. Mee told Forbes that a new approach was “the epiphany for me to do something that I've wanted to do for 25 years: apply a rigorous form of reverse engineering to these very old legacy systems.” Mechanical Orchard's Imogen platform records how a running system behaves and rewrites it to match.

He argues against big-bang replacements. “We are incrementally modernizing, and never doing a Big Bang. We're taking slices and going all the way through to production,” he told The New Stack. Unlike Pivotal, which taught customers new practices, his team builds and runs the replacement systems itself.