Rocket Software Recognized as a Challenger in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Technical Debt Management Tools

At Rocket Software, we’ve observed that the problem with technical debt is that it’s hidden until it’s not. That’s why we deliver comprehensive technical debt discovery, assessment, and remediation across your enterprise for the short and long term.
 

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Summary  

How can you manage technical debt across your entire enterprise?

Technical debt management isn't a one-time fix; it's an ongoing discipline. As organizations grapple with this reality, the market is starting to take notice. For example, Gartner has published its first Magic Quadrant for Technical Debt Management Tools.

At Rocket, we’re proud to be recognized in Gartner’s report. The Rocket Software Enterprise Suite helps enterprises discover where debt exists, understand its business impact, remediate systems incrementally, and prevent new debt from accumulating. Our unified approach connects architecture, code, runtime, and security insights, delivering a complete picture across your mainframe, distributed, and cloud environments.
 

How Rocket Software helps you turn technical debt awareness into action:

  • Full-lifecycle technical debt management: We support you from discovery through continuous monitoring with a single, trusted vendor…eliminating the need to coordinate multiple point solutions.
  • Guided remediation for complex environments: Our tools don't just highlight problems; they help you safely refactor code, extract business logic, transform legacy to APIs, and modernize in manageable steps.
  • Unified visibility across all systems: We connect technical debt insights across mainframe, distributed, and cloud systems, giving you a complete view of risk, impact, and opportunity.

 

Why enterprises world-wide trust us to manage their mission-critical systems?

50 %

Reduction in CPU usage through optimized code and architecture

0

Downtime during incremental modernization with guided remediation

4 X

Faster code comprehension with AI-enhanced analysis and plain-language explanations

What technical debt challenges can Rocket Software help you solve?

Limited visibility across systems

Discover technical debt across your environment

Technical debt builds quietly across legacy systems, tightly coupled architectures, and distributed environments. Without clear visibility, teams struggle to prioritize effectively or understand the impact of change. Rocket Software reveals dependencies and business impact across your entire ecosystem—from mainframe to cloud—so you can act with confidence.
 

How we help:

  • Identify where debt exists across architecture, code, runtime, and security layers
  • Map dependencies and assess business impact of potential changes
  • Uncover dead code, duplication, and risk areas that slow development
  • Pinpoint performance bottlenecks and instability, mapping issues directly to code and design
     

Featured technical debt discovery products

Explore Rocket Software's suite of products that address your visibility needs:

Rocket® Enterprise Analyzer

Reveals dependencies and business impact of change across your enterprise architecture. Understand how systems connect and what changes will affect before you make them.

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Rocket® COBOL Analyzer

Delivers a proven static code analysis toolset, enriched by GenAI insights and visualizations. Uncovers dead code, duplication, and risk areas in COBOL applications of any size, identifying technical debt patterns and improvement opportunities. 

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Rocket® Visual COBOL

Modernizes COBOL development with visual tools that make code easier to understand, maintain, and evolve in contemporary development environments.

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Rocket® z/Assure® Vulnerability Analysis Program

Identifies vulnerabilities, missing patches, and compliance gaps in your mainframe environment. Track security risks with continuous monitoring.

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Rocket® TMON®

Brings performance visibility to mainframe systems, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies that impact user experience and system stability.

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Lack of Clear Priorities

Focus your remediation efforts where they matter most

Organizations often recognize they have technical debt but struggle to decide what to tackle first. Without prioritizing based on business impact, teams can spend time on low-value work while critical risks go unaddressed. Rocket Software helps you understand the real business impact of technical debt, so you can focus on what matters most.

 

How we help:

  • Assess business impact of technical debt across all systems
  • Prioritize remediation based on risk, cost, and strategic value
  • Track technical debt trends over time to prevent accumulation
  • Integrate insights into existing planning and decision-making processes
  • Discover how to prioritize technical debt
     

Featured prioritization products

Explore Rocket Software's suite of products that address your prioritization needs:
 

Rocket® Enterprise Analyzer

Assesses the business impact of changes before you make them. Understand which technical debt creates the most risk and which improvements deliver the most value.

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Rocket® C\Prof

Profiles application performance to identify the specific code areas that cause the most significant performance issues, helping you focus optimization efforts.

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Rocket® Enterprise Server

Deploys mainframe applications on-premises or in the cloud with scalable infrastructure that helps you understand runtime behavior and prioritize improvements.

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Risky or Disruptive Remediation

Modernize safely with incremental, guided change

Many enterprises avoid addressing technical debt because remediation feels too risky, especially in mission-critical environments where uptime matters, but risk doesn’t fade away; it just grows. Rocket Software enables safe, incremental modernization that preserves valuable business logic while reducing risk throughout the process. We help you move from insight to action without disruption.

 

How we help:

  • Safely refactor and restructure code with testing for stability
  • Extract and reuse business logic without risky rewrites
  • Transform legacy systems to APIs incrementally
  • Modularize monolithic systems in manageable steps
  • Convert code to modern languages with human oversight
  • Integrate with familiar development tools and CI/CD pipelines

Featured safe remediation products

Explore Rocket Software's suite of products that address your remediation needs:

Rocket® Enterprise Developer

Modernizes mainframe applications with a contemporary IDE that supports IBM mainframe workflows, enabling developers to work in familiar environments.

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Rocket® Visual COBOL

Develop and modernize COBOL applications using modern tools and practices, making legacy code accessible to today's development teams.

Learn more

Rocket® Enterprise Server

Deploys mainframe applications with scalable infrastructure that supports testing and validation, ensuring changes don't introduce new risks.

Learn more

Rocket® COBOL Analyzer

Delivers a proven static code analysis toolset, enriched by GenAI insights and visualizations. Uncovers dead code, duplication, and risk areas in COBOL applications of any size, identifying technical debt patterns and improvement opportunities. Deep analysis that helps developers of any background navigate, visualize, and plan changes in code, with confidence

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Rocket® Enterprise Analyzer

Validates change impact before implementation, ensuring that improvements don't create unintended consequences in connected systems.

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Accumulating Technical Debt Over Time

Prevent new technical debt from accumulating

Technical debt management requires sustained diligence. Without continuous monitoring and enforcement of standards, debt accumulates faster than teams can remediate it. Rocket Software provides dashboards, trends, runtime insights, and pipeline integration that lets teams monitor progress, enforce standards, and respond before issues grow.

 

How we help:

  • Monitor technical debt trends continuously across all systems
  • Integrate quality and security controls into CI/CD pipelines
  • Enforce coding standards and architectural principles automatically
  • Track remediation progress and measure improvement over time
  • Use AI to spot technical debt risks early in the development process
  • Explore continuous technical debt management

Featured continuous management products

Explore Rocket Software's suite of products that address your ongoing management needs:

Rocket® Enterprise Developer

Integrates quality controls into modern development workflows, preventing new technical debt from entering production systems.

Learn more

Rocket® z/Assure® Vulnerability Analysis Program

Monitors security vulnerabilities and compliance gaps continuously, catching issues before they become critical risks.

/de-de/resources/zassure-vulnerability-analysis-program

Rocket® TMON®

Tracks performance trends over time, identifying degradation patterns that indicate accumulating technical debt.

Learn more

Rocket® Enterprise Analyzer

Monitors architectural complexity and coupling trends, alerting teams when systems become harder to change.

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PROVEN RESULTS

What do customers say about working with Rocket Software?

This tool (Rocket Enterprise Analyzer) is intelligent and helpful to analyze the entire workflow in complex enterprise application environments. "

Project Manager Insurance

In the Rocket-powered environment, one batch process was reduced from 2 hours to just 12 minutes. Others that used to take over 100 minutes are now completed in only a minute. The efficiency of our systems improved by over 80% overall, while select processes improved by more than 90%.”

Director of Technology and Systems Banking

Rocket® Enterprise Server enabled us to modernize our entire development environment. Replatforming our payroll application in AWS without changing our COBOL code was the fastest way to do the migration while minimizing the risk of logical application issues.”
 

Chief Architect Information Technology and Services
    z/Assure® Vulnerability Analysis Program (VAP)

    Major Global Bank: Add Vulnerability Scanning to Penetration Testing

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    Major Global Bank: Add Vulnerability Scanning to Penetration Testing
    Enterprise Suite

    DB Systel: Streamline Your Business Operations with Rocket® Enterprise Suite

    DB Systel
    DB Systel: Streamline Your Business Operations with Rocket® Enterprise Suite

    Insights

    Gartner Recognizes Rocket Software as a Challenger in the 2026 Magic Quadrant for Technical Debt Management Tools

    Rocket Software's positioned as a Challenger in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Technical Debt Management Tools. Licensed users, see Gartner MQ 

    Read the document

    Conquering Technical Debt Without Betting the Business

    Every IT leader knows the tension between keeping mission-critical systems running and answering the urgent call to innovate. When you manage complex enterprise environments, agility can often feel out of reach. The root cause of this friction is usually technical debt. 

    Read the blog here

    Frequently asked questions

    Source: Gartner Report, Magic Quadrant for Technical Debt Management Tools, By Tigran Egiazarov, Howard Dodd, Aaron Harrison, May 2026. 

    Gartner and Magic Quadrant are a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.