April 9, 2021

Phase Change President: Creative & focused AI needed to help COBOL skills shortage

The so-called "COBOL Skills Shortage" is compelling many organizations to impetuously hire and train programmers to maintain, support, and attempt to modernize their COBOL systems.
But understanding how to write COBOL is not enough — developers have to comprehend what an application actually does and how code changes can impact the system as a whole to avoid critical missteps. That work for those developers is cognitively difficult.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently wrote an article for Built In Colorado.com about how artificial intelligence (AI) can help solve the application knowledge gap problem, but only when traditional AI technology gets more creative and moves beyond understanding general business knowledge and instead learns specialized industry and institutional domain knowledge.

AI & software development

AI can help solve the application knowledge gap dilemma, but popular contemporary AI approaches are insufficient. Some AI tools can help with the syntax of writing code, but these remedies only provide incremental value.

Developers spend nearly 75 percent of their time finding the area in the source code in which they need to make a change because understanding code in these large complex systems is difficult and time-consuming.

AI will emerge as a paradigm-changing technology when it can understand code intent and “reimagine” computation into concepts, thereby doing what a developer does when they code — but at machine speed.

Read Steve’s entire Built In Colorado article at https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/cobol-skills-shortage.

March 10, 2021

Phase Change announces management changes in anticipation of market entry

March 10, 2021

By Todd Erickson

Phase Change Software announced a number of executive changes in anticipation of bringing its first product, COBOL Colleague, to market.

Founder and Inventor Steve Bucuvalas is stepping away from his roles as CEO and Chairman of the Board to enable him to focus all of his attention on product development and innovation, including Phase Change’s planned second product, a Java version of the company’s revolutionary platform. Steve will continue to serve on the Board of Directors.

Former President and current Board Member Gary Brach has assumed the role of CEO and will be focused on bringing COBOL Colleague to market. Former COO Steve Brothers was appointed President and will continue to be responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations.

In addition to the executive changes, the Board of Directors also elected long-time Member Don Peskin as the Chairman of the Board.

Bios

Steve Bucuvalas founded Phase Change in 2005 and has held many titles over the years, including Founder, President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Directors. Steve is the Chief Inventor of Phase Change's software digitization. He brings over 40 years of experience to software productivity. Steve graduated from Harvard University in 1977 and began his software career the same year as a Bank of Boston assembly language programmer. He has led corporate advanced technology groups, specialized database management systems, and much more over the course of his career. Steve brings an interdisciplinary perspective to solving the software digitization problem. Steve currently resides in Bernalillo, New Mexico.

Gary Brach, CEO, joined Phase Change as President and Board Member in 2016. He is focused on introducing Phase Change to the market. In the software industry, Gary has over 25 years of experience primarily as a software entrepreneur in the storage and insurance industries. Gary studied at Brown University and received his MBA at the University of Chicago. Gary currently resides in Boston and is an avid tennis player.

Steve Brothers, President, joined Phase Change as the COO in 2018, bringing over 30 years of experience in technology-related organizations with leadership, technical and sales roles in industries such as financial services, healthcare and services. Previously, Steve held positions as CEO at Ajubeo and Executive Vice President and CIO for Urban Lending Solutions. Steve graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder and holds a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Information Systems. Steve is a proud father of two boys, is a mentor at Galvanize and resides in Golden, CO.

Don Peskin is the Chairman of the Phase Change Board of Directors. He has been a Phase Change Board Member since November 2007. Don has more than 25 years of Wall Street and investment experience, most notably as a Managing Director and Principal at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, which he left in 1997 to pursue private investment opportunities in finance, technology, and related industries. He is the Founder and President of Short Hills Capital LLC, a privately held investment company. In addition to his principal investment activities, Don is also a Managing Member of the real-estate development firm Chatham Hills Development LLC, and he recently served as a Managing Member of Cognitive Capital Management, which was the General Partner of the Cognitive Strategic Fund.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

May 28, 2020

Can AI solve the engineer shortage?

May 30, 2020

by Todd Erickson

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed workforce shortages in a number of industries, including healthcare, food retail, and cybersecurity.

The related financial crisis and government financial assistance requests have also demonstrated a critical need for legacy system developers. The recent performance issues experienced by these financial assistance programs have exposed how dependent our financial and public infrastructure are on legacy and mainframe systems.

Phase Change COO Steve Brothers recently penned an article for ColoradoBiz Magazine about how the legacy application skills shortage threatens the software that underpins a great deal of the world's large financial and government systems.

He also talks about how artificial intelligence (AI) can be extremely effective in helping legacy application maintenance and development by introducing automation into the process, improving project management efficiencies, and by shortening the steep training curve typically experienced by developers new to these systems.

Learn more about how the improved productivity and efficiency AI brings to software development could be instrumental in maintaining and improving our critical legacy and mainframe systems.

Can AI solve the engineer shortage?
by Steve Brothers
ColoradoBiz magazine
May 15, 2020

Steve Brothers is the President of Phase Change Software. You can reach him on LinkedIn or at [email protected].

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer at Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected].

May 8, 2020

Colorado Inno profile explains how AI agent improves developer productivity

May 8, 2020

by Todd Erickson

Colorado Inno.com Associate Editor Nick Greenhalgh recently interviewed Phase Change President Steve Brothers for a profile story titled, "Golden startup's AI aims to make developers more efficient," that explains how our technology operates as a subject-matter expert and will improve software-developer efficiency and productivity, especially for industries that rely on enterprise software.

Read more at ColoradoInno.com.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer at Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected].

June 27, 2018

Phase Change introduces COO Steve Brothers

June 27, 2018

by Todd Erickson

Phase Change Software announced that veteran technology executive Steve Brothers joined the company as Chief Operating Officer (COO) as of June 1, 2018. Steve will focus on transitioning Phase Change from a research and development-focused organization to a growth-stage enterprise-software-solution provider.

“I’m excited to join the phenomenal team at Phase Change and have the opportunity to change the face of software development as we know it,” Steve said. “Hopefully my industry and technical experience will help us transform the company’s robust intellectual property into our initial significant product offerings.”

Steve has over 25 years of experience in technology related positions, but not necessarily technology focused companies. His career includes avocations with financial services, healthcare, and technology services companies.

Prior to joining Phase Change, Steve was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Ajubeo, an enterprise-class cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) provider. Ajubeo was acquired by Green House Data in November 2017.

He started with Ajubeo in 2012 as a Senior Account Executive and served in several capacities thereafter, such as Director of Partner Solutions and Vice President of Operations and Technology before rising to CEO in 2015.

Before embarking with Ajubeo, Steve served as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Urban Lending Solutions, a provider of outsourced mortgage services. The appraisal side was acquired by MCMG Holdings in March 2017 and the fulfillment side was acquired by HCL Technologies in April 2017.

Steve’s responsibilities at Urban Lending Solutions centered on building the business as a whole and not strictly the technology side. He specialized in bringing together the company’s business personnel and objectives, and its technology staff and goals. His specialties spanned a broad range of responsibilities, including strategic business planning, resource management, team development, and technical-operations management.

"At Urban Lending, I began to realize the vision of the proper alignment between technology and what the business was trying to accomplish,” Steve said. “It gave me additional perspective on the role of technology across organizations of different sizes, visions, and directions."

His education reflects his holistic approach to his career. He graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Information Systems from the university’s Leeds School of Business.

"There's an interesting correlation between philosophy and technology,” Steve said. “At a minimum, the logic required to be successful in philosophy obviously applies to technology. In addition, the critical thinking and argumentative style of interacting with others to drive new thought processes is also a good alignment.”

Todd Erickson is a tech writer with Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter @PhaseChangeAI.

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