The people behind Filix.

Michael Burgun

Michael founded Filix and leads the design of the Cobra Modernisation Platform and the Filix AI methodology. His career has been spent inside the COBOL systems the rest of the industry now wants to modernise — first as a developer and architect, then as a consultant working with banks, insurers, and other large enterprises on the long, slow problem of getting off the mainframe without losing what it knows.

He started Filix to build the platform he wished he had had on every previous modernisation engagement: a real COBOL runtime integrated with modern .NET, an authoritative metadata layer that AI agents can quote facts from rather than guess at, and an opinionated methodology that makes the safe choice the easy default. Cobra is the working answer to the question he had been asking himself for years.

Michael writes regularly about legacy modernisation and the practical realities of using AI in mission-critical engineering work — pieces like Modernizing Mainframe Systems: The Imperative of Expertise and Navigating a Risky Course: Challenges of Mainframe Implementation in a New Era. His writing argues that mainframe modernisation is neither the cheerleader-led panacea nor the sky-is-falling catastrophe it is sometimes made out to be — it is hard, valuable work that benefits from real expertise applied with judgement.

He works from Coffs Harbour on the New South Wales mid-north coast and spends as much time in code as he does in client conversations.