Do you actually know what your systems do?
Not what the documentation says. Not what anyone remembers. What the code actually does: every rule, every term, every dependency, in language your business can read.
Discovery 1.0, the engine behind the Understand phase of the altitude80 Modernization Workbench, is now licensable on its own. You share the code; Discovery hands back the understanding.
IF ACCT-EXPIRATION-DATE >= DALYTRAN-ORIG-TS (1:10) ELSE MOVE 'TRANSACTION RECEIVED AFTER ACCT EXPIRATION' TO WS-VALIDATION-FAIL-REASON-DESC END-IF
A transaction dated on or after the account's expiration date is rejected, and the reason is recorded for review.
COMPUTE WS-MONTHLY-INT = (TRAN-CAT-BAL * DIS-INT-RATE) / 1200 ADD WS-MONTHLY-INT TO WS-TOTAL-INT
Monthly interest for each transaction category is the balance times the annual rate, divided by 1200, and added to the account's total interest.
Ingest the code. Understand what it does.
Discovery ingests your source code and related technology artifacts, then applies purpose-built program analysis to build a comprehensive, evidence-based understanding of your application portfolio. AI then translates that analysis into language your business can read. Not a guess. Not stale documentation. What your systems actually do.
Business understanding
The terminology, processes, entities, and events that drive your application, expressed in language your business stakeholders can read and validate.
Rules in natural language
Key logic extracted from the code and translated into plain-English business rules. Not pseudocode. Rules a business analyst can review.
Data mapped to meaning
Data mapped to the business rules, programs, processes, and events that touch it, with a generated entity relationship model and dependency mapping.
Actual Discovery 1.0 output, shown on CardDemo, a public sample mainframe application.
⤢ Enlarge
Everything Discovery produces lands in one connected model: the altitude80 Knowledge Repository. Not a report that goes stale. A queryable, working asset your business keeps, and builds on.
Modernization goes wrong when teams start with the code instead of the understanding.
The platform gets migrated. The intelligence that made it work gets left behind: business logic, data lineage, and institutional knowledge that existed nowhere but in the code and in people who have since moved on.
Discovery closes that gap before a single line is rewritten, producing one shared, accurate picture that business stakeholders, architects, and engineers can all work from.
Understand first. Then modernize.
Maintain the logic. Not the code.
Plenty of platforms now say they extract the business rules in your code. Look at what happens next: the rules are used to generate new code, and the moment that code ships, the logic is buried again. Same rules, same workarounds, same dead ends, in a newer language. The code is still the only record of how your business runs.
altitude80 holds what Discovery recovers as an asset in its own right: rules, processes, terminology, and data, connected and readable, separate from any implementation. Extraction tells you the rules the code contains. Discovery shows you the rules the business intended, including what is wrong, dead, duplicated, or obsolete.
That separation changes the work. Your team validates, adjusts, adds, and retires rules in business language, before a line of new code is written. Code is generated from the logic, and can be regenerated as the business changes.
Extract rules → generate new code → logic re-buried.
You maintain the code.
Recover the logic → the business shapes it → generate code on demand.
You maintain the logic.
The lifecycle of the future isn't maintaining code. It's maintaining business logic.
And that is the foundation the agentic era requires. AI agents will not run the business on buried COBOL. They will run it on business logic that is explicit, validated, and connected. Discovery is how that foundation gets built.
"When a platform hands you back your business rules, who in your organization can tell you if they're right?"
Less than half the time. Less than half the cost. Read in full, not in samples.
Traditional discovery is people reading code: slow, expensive, and over when the budget is. Discovery changes both the pace and the coverage.
Nine business days. One legacy portfolio.
Results from a financial services client engagement using the altitude80 Modernization Workbench.
Are you a candidate?
Discovery earns its keep on large, complex mainframe systems where the knowledge has thinned out and the business logic has to be recovered, not just a platform moved. If most of these describe you, you're the kind of organization it's built for.
Tell us about your system.
No form. No sales sequence. One email, straight to the team that runs Discovery, and one honest reply. If it's a fit, we'll talk about scope, licensing, and a proof of value on your own code. If it isn't, we'll tell you that too.