(Re) Writing Code

"In that kind of translation, it's easy to generate the worst kind of spaghetti code," explains John Bilotta, 53, VP of operational-support services at Schwab, who served as program manager for the conversion. "We risked spending a lot of money and time, and ending up with applications that didn't work as well as the old ones." But Schwab's only alternative to using an automation tool like RescueWare was to throw out the legacy program and rewrite it from scratch. "We really didn't want to do that," Bilotta says. Given how high the stakes were, Schwab decided to send Seer*HPS to Relativity. After three months of analysis, automated code writing, and product testing, Relativity returned the mutual-fund functions to Schwab in COBOL. Hardly any new computer program operates perfectly during its first run. Glitches are a fact of life even in word-processing software, let alone applications that handle complex financial calculations. But Relativity's conversion ran perfectly the first time out. And it performed the mutual-fund calculations 50% faster than the old version had done. Today, all of Schwab's customers depend on RescueWare-generated code for the maintenance of their portfolio. "Relativity had the expertise that we needed," Bilotta says.

The Schwab conversion also came in on time and under budget -- a major feat for any conversion, and all the more so for a project undertaken by a new company. In the past two years, Relativity has taken on five other conversion projects for Schwab, including one that speeds up the process by which service reps access customer accounts.

But even that success story isn't enough for Relativity. The Schwab experience was about moving technology from the past to the present. RescueWare's real challenge -- its true promise -- involves acting as a tool for converting present technology into future technology. Relativity doesn't just want to be a one-shot solution for companies trying to extricate themselves from ailing computer languages. It also wants to be a one-stop resource for companies seeking to keep pace with advances like the wireless Internet. Financial-services outfits like Schwab are starting to enable customers to trade stocks using cell-phones and other mobile devices. Using wireless devices, customers can also access research and account data wherever they happen to be. These days, even the most Webcentric company needs to be moving its operations to a wireless platform. So Relativity has equipped the most recent version of RescueWare to translate any program into a version of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).

"The way that people deliver information keeps changing, but the way that business decisions are made doesn't change as often," says Wadhwa. "Our value is to make use of existing information, so you don't have to throw away your work and start over."

A Slap to the Forehead

Like many other middle-aged techies, Vivek Wadhwa grew up hacking computers. But he's a lot more engaging than the average hacker. He is an entertaining storyteller. He knows when to sprinkle his company saga with telling anecdotes and when to lay off the technobabble. He offers a simple explanation for why company leaders don't know what their company's software does: "Real men don't do documentation."

Wadhwa, the son of an Indian diplomat, grew up in Australia. He spent his days at the University of Canberra hacking into university and company systems. He then came to the United States and earned an MBA from New York University, and in 1986, he joined the it department of First Boston (which became Credit Suisse First Boston [CSFB] in 1988). There, he encountered a problem that his hacking experience hadn't prepared him for. First Boston needed to upgrade its massive information systems. The bank wanted to be able to calculate trades 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- instead of leaving such calculations "pending" until batch computer runs could take place each night. Wadhwa and his team were unable to reconfigure the existing system, and in its place they wrote hundreds of programs from scratch. The new system cost $150 million to create -- and still it couldn't carry over any code from the old system.

Wadhwa believed that there was a better way to approach such projects, and he wasn't alone. In 1990, he was asked to join a company that did for other organizations what he had done at First Boston. That company was Seer Technologies, a joint venture between CSFB and IBM. "Customers were demanding a program that would do conversions," he recalls. "I wish I could tell you that I was a visionary, but I wasn't."

But Seer's vision for how to create such a program was limited. So Wadhwa, who had become the company's CTO, began searching for people who might take a broader view of the conversion problem. In 1991, he and Len Erlikh, a former First Boston colleague who had joined him at Seer, hit upon the idea of tapping talent in Russia. (Erlikh, now 42, is a Russian Jew who had immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1978.) Both men had heard about Terekhov from former students of his who were working as programmers at Seer, and they decided to seek him out.