Jerry
Harlow

Enterprise Architect.
35 years. Atlanta.

Companies run on software, and software gets old. I'm the senior architect you bring in when an important system is getting risky, or too tangled to change safely. Thirty-five years of that: the systems that keep stores selling, phones connecting, and shelves stocked, mostly on Microsoft's .NET and SQL Server. Mid-sized and regional companies as much as large ones. Three ways I help: as a fractional architect (a few days a month, not a full-time hire), an AI engineering advisor, or an expert witness when software ends up in court.

Atlanta · GA
35 years at it
Book a short call
01 · About

Thirty-five years inside enterprise systems.

"Enterprise systems" is the resume phrase. In practice it means the software behind store checkouts, phone bills, and warehouse shelves: retail, telecom, supply chain, most of it long-lived Microsoft software. I have built systems from scratch, inherited other people's, scaled them well past what they were designed for, and been the person who works out what to do when the architecture stops cooperating.

Most consultants specialize in building the new thing. My background is wider than that. Engineering, architecture, keeping systems running safely once they are live, and the part nobody volunteers for, which is making sure the transition actually goes live and the system still runs the morning after.

These days I work as an advisor, a fractional architect, and a software expert witness. I am based in Atlanta, available on-site across the Southeast or remote. This site is where you engage me directly for that work. Evincia is my firm; its product is a fixed-scope, independent risk report for aging .NET and SQL Server systems.

Portrait of Jerry Harlow
Jerry Harlow Atlanta
02 · Currently

What I'm building now.

Evincia

Evincia is the firm I am building. Its first product is a fixed-scope health check for aging .NET and SQL Server systems: an automated read of the code that tells you where the real risks are before you commit to modernizing. Think home inspection, but for the software a business runs on.

If you want that specific health check, it lives at evincia.co. Everything else here, the advisory and the fractional work, is just me.

Evincia mascot evincia.co
03 · Selected experience

Across telecom, retail, supply chain, and the Microsoft ecosystem.

Read it bottom to top: the Army, then three decades of systems that had to work every day -- checkout lines, employee schedules, phone service for tens of millions.

2026 to Present
Founder & Principal Advisor
Evincia, LLC · Atlanta

Evincia is a technology risk-assessment firm I founded to help organizations understand what modernizing a legacy .NET or SQL Server system will actually cost them in risk before committing to a migration. I wrote a deterministic diagnostic that gathers objective, repeatable evidence straight from the codebase. While much of the industry is racing to point AI at code and let it diagnose, I went the other way: establish the factual evidence first, then let AI help organize the story.

Current
2013 to 2025
Enterprise Architect and Delivery Manager
Cricket Wireless (via Dexian) · Atlanta

At Cricket I led over 30 developers across multiple teams. The job was really several jobs at once: team leader, architect, product owner, vendor manager, and hands-on engineer. I was architect of record for the retail store identity and access system, which I helped build from the ground up. AT&T, Cricket's parent, runs the company's one central identity platform: the system of record for who works there and what they are allowed to use. The system managed the store employees and their roles, and provisioned each change -- a hire, a role change, a departure -- to that platform in real time. My team also built a single sign-on application that employees log in with, which checks them against AT&T's platform rather than ours. Roughly two-thirds of my developers worked the consumer side: Cricket's website, cricketwireless.com, on both the front end and the back end. Across all of it I also planned and led migrations of aging monoliths toward microservices, SaaS, and modular monoliths, and helped the organization grow up around the work: Agile and DevOps, CI/CD and Git-based delivery, Infrastructure as Code, cloud-native platforms, automated testing, observability, security and compliance, and, more recently, AI-assisted development.

Telecom
2006 to 2013
Principal Consultant & Owner
Evincia, Inc. · Alpharetta, GA

I worked as an independent .NET consultant, taking on contract engineering and building and hosting websites for Atlanta-area businesses. My clients included Thomson Reuters and Apartments.com, and I was running client systems on Amazon's cloud (EC2) while it was still in beta.

Advisory
2004 to 2006
Product Lead
BlueCube Software · Alpharetta, GA

I built and maintained the work-item tracker the whole organization ran on, and I led a team that automated retail logistics -- including inventory re-ordering -- for client headquarters operations.

Retail / supply chain
1992 to 2004
Senior Manager, Software Development
Radiant Systems · Alpharetta, GA

I was architect of record for Radiant's automotive-care product and led development teams in the Convenience Store division. I also oversaw development across other divisions, including Entertainment (movie theaters) and Food Service (restaurants and fast food).

Retail POS
1982 to 1988
Military Police
United States Army

Airborne and jungle-combat qualified. Ranger School. Germany, Panama, Egypt, and Honduras.

Service

The long version, with the detail, is on LinkedIn.

04 · Philosophy

How I think about old systems.

Systems that have been running for 15 or 20 years carry weight you cannot see in the code. Things get wired to other things nobody wrote down. Delivery pressure shaped the design in ways nobody documented. And the order you change things in matters more than most teams expect when they start.

The point is not to modernize everything. The point is to change what needs changing without breaking what already works.

05 · Work with me

Three Ways In.

All of it comes down to three ways in. Pick the one that sounds like your situation.

01 Fractional & advisory

Fractional Architect

The senior architect you bring in a few days a month, when an important .NET or SQL Server system is getting risky to change and the people who built it have moved on. I set direction, review the decisions that are expensive to get wrong, give a straight read on what to modernize and what to leave alone, and stay hands-on enough to be useful. Advisory from the outside, or embedded with your team, depending on the work.

Details below 02 Litigation

Expert Witness

Consulting and testifying work on software disputes: failed implementations, disputed deliverables, and arguments about whether a system was built and run correctly. Analyzed by someone who has built and run this kind of system in production, not someone reading the codebase for the first time the week before a deposition.

View practice page 03 AI adoption

AI Engineering Advisor

Independent guidance for engineering leaders adopting AI-assisted development. I use the tools in my own work, and I have spent thirty-five years running the kind of systems they get pointed at. Practical guidance grounded in real software delivery, not hype.

Details below
06 · Fractional architect

A senior architect on your team, a few days a month.

Most companies do not need a full-time architect. They need someone senior in the room for the decisions that are expensive to get wrong, and gone again before the payroll line starts to hurt.

That is the job. I set technical direction, review the risky calls, keep a migration honest, and help your team ship without painting itself into a corner. Regional and mid-sized companies included; you do not have to be a Fortune 500 to get my attention.

Where I help

01
A migration -- moving a system onto a new platform -- that needs a steady hand
02
Architecture decisions that nobody senior is responsible for
03
A team that is good, but stretched too thin to think a year ahead
04
An aging .NET or SQL Server system that is getting risky to change
05
A second opinion before a big rebuild or vendor commitment
06
Technical standards and direction that keep quietly drifting

I am not the kind of consultant who shows up, runs a workshop, and leaves you a slide deck. I get into the real system: the code, the database, the decisions already made and the ones still open. Sometimes that is a standing day or two a month; sometimes it is a block of time around one specific decision, or a one-off straight read on what you have: what is actually at risk, what to fix first, what to leave alone. I do not sell the rebuild, so I have no reason to tell you that you need one. Now and then the job is talking someone out of rebuilding a thing that works fine.

Either way, the arrangement should get smaller over time, not bigger. If your team is not handling more of this without me by the end, I am doing it wrong. On-site around metro Atlanta, or remote. The first step is a short call: tell me what is going on, and I will tell you if I can help.

07 · AI engineering advisor

AI can generate code. It cannot generate judgment.

I help engineering leaders adopt AI-assisted development without creating new operational risk. Thirty-five years inside enterprise systems, hands-on with modern AI development tools. For leaders who need practical adoption decisions, not vendor theater.

Most teams are already experimenting with AI-assisted development. Fewer can say where it actually helps, or what guardrails should sit around it. Developers are using AI. Vendors are selling AI. Leadership is being asked for answers.

Generating the code is rarely the hard part. The hard part is deciding what can safely change inside systems that have been running the business for years. I help organizations make those decisions.

One distinction worth making: this is independent advice on how your teams adopt AI-assisted development. It is not an Evincia diagnostic, which is a fixed-scope report that happens to use AI inside its own engine.

How I help

01
Help your team figure out the smart way to use AI tools
02
Help your team figure out how to modernize legacy systems
03
Evaluate your old, outdated software and update it with modern methods such as AI agents
04
Help your organization set up clear rules, standards, and oversight so your developers follow best practices
05
Help your team use AI to automatically check new code for bugs, security issues, style problems, and inefficiencies
06
Build a plan for bringing in new tech (especially AI) without causing chaos, security problems, or big failures
07
Help you pick the right software tools, platforms, or AI products for your team
08
Provide leadership with clear, no-jargon explanations of what is happening with your tech, what the risks and opportunities are, and what decisions need to be made
09
Work directly with your developers and engineers to level them up: sharing knowledge, giving feedback, teaching better ways to work, and helping them grow their skills through real projects

Most AI advisors are either AI specialists with limited experience running enterprise systems, or software practitioners still learning how modern AI tooling behaves. My perspective comes from both sides: thirty-five years building, operating, modernizing, and supporting production systems, and hands-on use of AI development tools, AI agents that carry out multi-step work, and automated code analysis in my own work today. That combination matters.

The biggest AI failures are rarely technical failures. They are failures of judgment, sequencing, governance, and operational understanding.

Typical engagements

A few observations

AI can generate code faster than most organizations can safely review it.
AI can accelerate modernization, but it cannot recover missing business knowledge.
A map of what depends on what is often more valuable than another thousand lines of generated code.
The question is not whether AI can write software.
The question is whether the organization understands what it is changing.
Evidence first. AI second.
08 · Contact

A short call is the easiest way.

Email jerry@jerryharlow.com Phone (404) 615-7036 Calendar Book a 30-minute call

If something is getting risky (an aging system, a migration you are unsure about, a team that needs senior cover), that is the kind of call I take. A sentence of context in the booking form helps. Not everything has to be business, either. Old colleagues, neighbors, the curious: email works.

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/jerryharlow
09 · Guestbook

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