Relativity Technologies Grows Fast from Legacy Application Modernization

Published: April 30, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a rare day when a privately held software company gives the world a peek into their books, but legacy application modernization software vendor Relativity Technologies last week divulged a few morsels of its most recent financial results.

Relativity is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has been in business for the past decade. Its core product, which is called Modernization Workbench, is used to take just about any kind of legacy application you can imagine--RPG, COBOL, PL1, Visual Basic, C and C++--and run it through a language parser that can break it down into business rules that can then be exposed in a manner that is consistent with a services oriented architecture (SOA) application development model. The System i5 platform was first supported last year. (Yes, Visual Basic is a legacy language.) The company started out doing legacy modernization for PL1 and COBOL applications, and is expanding outward.

In 2006, Relativity said that it added over 70 customers for Modernization Workbench, boosting the number to 325 customers worldwide. Interestingly, the company established a subsidiary in India in May 2006, and India and Brazil together had revenue growth of over 260 percent in calendar 2006, compared to 86 percent revenue growth overall for the company in the same period. Obviously, the companies that are doing application modernization on an outsourced basis from India are looking for tools to help them do that.

In its first quarter ended in March, the company said that it exceeded its revenue plan, with sales up 63 percent compared to the year-ago quarter and up 46 percent from the last quarter of 2006. In early February, language parsers for Visual Basic, C/C++, Java, and PowerBuilder were added to the Modernization Workbench. This will likely fuel growth in the coming quarters.

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