Parke Cooper

In this episode of The Disruptor Podcast, host John Kundtz interviews Caitlyn Truong, CEO and Co-founder of Zengines.

Mainframe Modernization Prioritization and Challenges

While mainframes are highly performant and reliable, many organizations are seeking to modernize them to de-risk legacy technology.

Mainframe legacy technology is risky to organizations for several reasons, including:

• Code written decades ago with SMEs no longer available
• Fewer people familiar with older programming languages
• Lack of standards in older code making maintenance difficult

According to Caitlyn, "There are more lines of COBOL code in existence than any other programming language," making mainframe modernization particularly challenging.

Zengines Mainframe Data Lineage Product

Caitlyn explains that Zengines' Mainframe Data Lineage product was developed when they discovered a client struggling to modernize because their mainframe was a "black box." The product ingests schemas, metadata, code (including COBOL and JCLs) to create a data lineage information base, helping business analysts understand calculation logic and conditions critical to modernization success.

Zengines' Mainframe Data Lineage product helps organizations understand their legacy systems by providing:

• Interactive research application and data
• Data lineage with graphical visualization
• Relationship mapping between modules, tables, fields, and variables
• Tables and fields inventory with profiling
• Calculation logic analysis
• Branching/conditional statement analysis

Recommendations for Mainframe Modernization Success

Caitlyn's recommendations for mainframe modernization success include:

• Understand what you're converting and the full lineage/interdependencies
• Have a guiding strategy and design - use phased approaches rather than "big bang"
• Employ proper tools for data lineage to answer questions about the system
• Start small with something you know you can convert, then celebrate successes

Her most important advice is to "get started" rather than spending too much time planning: "You'll learn and get more value just by doing."

Listen to the full episode

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In this episode of The Disruptor Podcast, host John Kundtz interviews Caitlyn Truong, CEO and Co-founder of Zengines.

This show explores how Zengines disrupts organizations' efforts to automate the end-to-end data conversion process.

Caitlyn shares information from her background in electrical and computer engineering and consulting. She often saw the problems with data conversion and migration in large organizations, especially in financial services.

This led her to co-found Zengines to help ensure data stays useful during modernization.

Key points from their discussion

• Understanding Data Migration: It includes all steps to get a new system running, from getting the data mapped and moved to post migration testing.
• Common Pitfalls: Not accounting for all the steps, lack of a plan, not using tools, and not underestimating the work effort.
• Advice for Smoother Migration: Understand all the steps, plan clearly, use tools (especially AI), empower business analysts, and work in steps.

Zengines' Disruptive Way

• Zengines gives business analysts AI tools to automate mapping and changing data.
• This "shift left" approach reduces the need for large teams, making data conversion faster and more efficient by letting the business directly influence data changes.
• This approach moves the work earlier in the process, making data conversion less expensive, more productive, and quicker by letting the business directly affect how data is changed.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this conversation, where Caitlyn and John shift gears and explore the challenges many enterprises face with Mainframe Modernization.

Listen to the full episode

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Do you know exactly where your critical data originates, how it transforms, and where it travels throughout your organization?

We're excited to share that our CEO, Caitlyn Truong, was recently a guest on The Lights On Data Show with host George Firican, revealing why data lineage is such a critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of data management. 

What you'll discover in this episode

• The true definition of data lineage and why it's a critical component for regulatory compliance, transparency, and operational efficiency
• 5 Essential Steps for Successful Data Lineage Implementation:
  • Be clear on use case and scope
  • Have a guiding strategy and design
  • Employ automation tools
  • Start with small focused use cases
  • Celebrate success and expand
• How to overcome "black box" legacy system challenges by leveraging tools like Zengines to capture metadata, understand data patterns, and parse code bases to reverse engineer business context

Why this matters

Caitlyn shares how organizations are increasingly prioritizing data lineage tools to address mainframe management and mainframe modernization projects.

The drivers behind these initiatives include:

• Scarcity of resources who understand legacy systems and code (like COBOL)
• Growing regulatory requirements for transparency
• Critical operational risk reduction

At Zengines, we're helping organizations better understand their mainframes and complex data journeys with AI-powered tools that help business users visualize, research, and discover data lineage components to answer business questions. 

Listen to the full episode

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Many software companies and service providers either survive or thrive based on their ability to scale customer onboarding. But for many, one step consistently stalls momentum: data migration.

The excitement of closing a new deal quickly fades when teams realize how complex and messy transferring customer data into a new system can be. And for customers? A painful onboarding experience with errors, delays, or unexpected work often becomes their first impression of your platform.

At Zengines, we’ve built a better way to migrate data and onboard customers.

The Hidden Cost of Poor Data Migration

Every vendor has felt it: a new customer signs on, and the first real ask is, “Please provide your data in our format.” From there, it’s a guessing game. The customer takes a first pass. It fails. They try again. Still wrong. Eventually, they bring in an expert or third-party firm to bridge the gap — adding time, cost, and frustration for everyone involved.

Some of the most common challenges we see include:

• Inconsistent source formats: Customers often hand over overloaded spreadsheets or fragmented exports that don’t match the vendor’s data model.
• Lack of standardization: What one customer calls “Client ID,” another may call “Customer Number.” Field names, structures, and data types are almost never aligned.
• Complex transformation requirements: Names need to be split into first and last. Text needs to become numeric. Fields need to be concatenated, truncated, or translated.
• No visibility into data quality: Null values, inconsistent formatting, or invalid field types create downstream failures — often caught only after the fact.
• Inefficient manual workflows: Multiple iterations between the vendor and the customer drag out timelines, impact revenue recognition, and lead to customer dissatisfaction.

And perhaps most importantly, these challenges hit vendors where it hurts — in the form of higher onboarding costs, delayed time to value, and increased churn risk.

The Zengines Approach: Frictionless Data Conversions

Zengines was built to simplify and accelerate this process. 

Our platform is designed to help vendors accelerate customer onboarding by making data migration faster, more accurate, and dramatically less painful — for both the vendor and the customer.

Here’s how it works:

AI-Powered Schema Mapping

Forget the days of side-by-side spreadsheets and trial-and-error mapping. With Zengines, our AI automatically compares your source and target schemas and predicts the best field matches. You get a fast, intelligent starting point — then validate or adjust as needed.

Whether you’re dealing with flat files, legacy exports, or structured CRM tables, Zengines bridges the gap with speed and precision.

AI-Assisted Transformations

Need to split full names into first and last? Convert “TX” to “Texas”? Strip out characters from phone numbers or coerce string values into numerics?

Just describe the transformation you want in plain English — and Zengines will auto-generate the rule. You can test it, tweak it, and apply it — all without writing code or calling in a data engineer.

Data Profiling & Cleansing

Our platform automatically profiles incoming data so you can spot hygiene issues, inconsistent formats, or type mismatches before they derail your project. We highlight anomalies, nulls, or outliers — and help you fix them with either pre-built rules or AI-powered suggestions.

Think of it as a project manager’s dream: instant visibility into the size, scope, and quality of your incoming data.

Instant Load File Generation

Once your mappings and transformations are set, Zengines generates clean, validated load files — instantly. No waiting on test environments, no bouncing between systems. You can preview and approve the file directly in our interface and push it into your target system with confidence.

Data Lineage for Legacy Systems

Migrating from legacy platforms like mainframes? Our Data Lineage module lets teams decode black-box systems (like COBOL modules or JCL job control files) and trace how data is computed, transformed, and passed across systems.

Whether you’re reverse-engineering business logic or preparing for full-scale modernization, Zengines helps you understand your legacy data so you can move forward with clarity.

Why vendors love Zengines

We didn’t just build a better data migration tool. We built a scalable customer onboarding accelerator.

Vendors love Zengines because:

• It reduces onboarding time from months to days or even hours
• It slashes reliance on expensive service teams or consultants
• It improves implementation success rates and customer satisfaction
• It accelerates time-to-revenue by getting customers live faster
• It scales with your business — whether you onboard 10 or 1,000 customers a year

Let’s Make Data Migration a Growth Lever — Not a Bottleneck

Data migration doesn’t have to be the painful part of your onboarding process. With Zengines, it becomes your superpower.

You can go live faster. Delight customers from day one. And scale your implementations without scaling your services team.

Schedule a demo and see how Zengines can transform your customer onboarding.