Meridian Mainframe Insight

The problem#

The services that run banks, insurers and public administrations often sit on mainframes nobody fully understands any more. The documentation is missing or decades out of date. The people who know the systems are retiring. Every change, audit or modernization plan starts with an expensive archaeology project.

What it does#

Meridian Mainframe Insight delivers documentation as a service for those estates. It turns the mainframe services themselves into documentation that people can browse, search and ask questions of. Teams stop depending on the memory of a few experts, and newcomers get up to speed through the system rather than through shadowing.

How it works#

It comes in two delivery models. In both, everything runs inside the customer’s own environment:

  mainframe code & artefacts
        │
        ├──► centrally hosted, in the customer's environment
        │       documentation service + COBOL onboarding agent
        │
        └──► local desktop app (Electron)
                documentation portal on the team's own machines

• Centrally hosted: one shared documentation service for the organization, run inside its own environment, with a COBOL onboarding agent that guides engineers through the estate.
• Local desktop app: the same documentation portal running on the team’s own machines.

The hard part#

Completeness, at mainframe scale, without the code going anywhere.

• Completeness and complexity. A COBOL estate is not just programs. It is JCL jobs, copybooks, screens, transactions and datasets, all wired together, and documentation is only trustworthy when it covers every one of them and how they connect.
• Sheer size. These codebases have grown over decades and can run to millions of lines.
• A delivery model that never asks for the code. Everything is produced fully locally, inside the customer’s environment. No code is sent anywhere.

Each of those is hard on its own. Delivering all three together is what makes Meridian unusual, and it was the hardest part to get right.

Where it stands#

Meridian Mainframe Insight is proprietary. I built it for Itera, and it is available only through Itera.