(Re) Writing Code

In the summer of 1991, the Russian mathematician Andrey Terekhov stood in the middle of a potato field outside St. Petersburg. As he scanned the dry, nearly infertile land, he felt a sense of humiliation. "I, a world-famous professor, was preparing potatoes," he recalls. Terekhov, the creator of key telecommunications systems for the KGB, had been a mentor to hundreds of Russia's best mathematical minds. But in post-Soviet Russia, the government had stopped paying him the small salary that he had earned as a professor at St. Petersburg State University. So he had forfeited a labor of love -- the study of algorithms, geometry, the theory of graphs -- for hard labor.

Then something occurred that changed Terekhov's life. Two American IT executives traveled to St. Petersburg to find the mathematician. They wanted to hire Terekhov to tackle a problem that was confounding U.S. programmers -- and frustrating many large U.S. corporations. The problem was as simple as it was dire: Computers and software languages were evolving so fast that companies were accumulating vital programs, and critical business data, in languages that were going out of date. Well before the Internet frenzy -- which only made the problem worse -- companies were struggling with how to translate their financial records, their inventory systems, and the programs that ran their factories into new, more flexible languages.

The standard solution was clumsy and expensive: Fill a room with engineers, have them manually dissect an existing program -- and then have them manually rewrite that program in a new language. It took too much time, it cost too much money, it resulted in buggy code, and it was unrewarding for the people who did it. (It was the programming equivalent of potato farming.) The American executives had heard that Terekhov might be able to automate the entire conversion process. The Russian jumped at the chance: "What else could I say but 'Yes,' " he recalls.

Ten years, three companies, and several versions of software later, Terekhov and the team that he assembled have created a product, RescueWare 6.0, that does for software languages what science-fiction writers have imagined machines doing for human languages: translate one into another quickly and seamlessly. Thanks to RescueWare, information that was previously locked in mainframes can now be displayed on Web pages, and programs that used to run only on big boxes in COBOL can now run on servers in Java.

RescueWare is a huge innovation -- one that has already had a tremendous impact on Terekhov. The 51-year-old mathematician, who resembles a smiling Fidel Castro, now earns 10 times as much as the going wage for a Russian mathematics professor. He runs Lanit-Tercom, a St. Petersburg-based telecommunications-software company. He owns a four-story house with a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, a basketball court -- and no potatoes in the yard. Meanwhile, the two men who sought him out, Vivek Wadhwa and Len Erlikh, run a company called Relativity Technologies, which produces and sells RescueWare. Based in Cary, North Carolina, Relativity has a client list that includes Charles Schwab, Ernst & Young, and the U.S. Air Force. Wadhwa and Erlikh compare Terekhov's achievement to cracking the atom. "This guy is a Russian Einstein," says Wadhwa, 43, CEO.

Hyperbole aside, what Terekhov and his team have built could change the game of change for big, information-driven companies. If RescueWare works as promised, it will allow companies to become as digital as they want to be. With a tool that makes change easier, faster, and less risky, companies may start changing their systems more often, reaping benefits both for their business and for their customers. And automating change means increasing the pace of change. Not only does RescueWare have the potential to liberate companies from outdated programs; it also has the potential to liberate programmers from outdated careers as software translators. That would leave them free to pursue more useful, and more creative, work -- free, in other words, to unleash even more change.

Past, Present, Future

At Charles Schwab, huge supercomputers power the operations of a financial-services giant: Mainframes process stock trades, calculate returns on mutual funds, and pull up and display customer accounts for service reps. As recently as a year ago, many of those functions were run in Seer*HPS, a proprietary computer language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. Schwab's IT directors wanted to transfer those tasks to a version of COBOL, in part because the company's army of programmers knew that language fluently.

This isn't glamorous work, but it's exactly the kind of work that companies must undertake if they are to improve their operations dramatically. Not only does Schwab have all kinds of data locked up in old formats, but, equally important, it relies on all kinds of formulas for using that data. One key function, for example, calculates the average cost bases for Schwab's 2,000-plus mutual funds. Conversions that handle such "deep" code are what Relativity aims to specialize in.