What kind of recognition are you looking for? Programmers are not usually "Rock Stars"; if the code works you rarely hear a word about it and you might get an extra dime come review time. If there is a problem, whoa boy you'll hear about it.

If you don't want to support it, then make part of your presentation that management needs to find a programmer to support it.

How do you know the other individual didn't see any reward? What was he doing 8 years ago? How much of a promotion is running the companies Network Security from that? Would he have gotten there without it? as soon?

What I am trying to say is that programming utilities is generally thankless, usually the closest you come to a thank you is someone telling you that tool would be useful if it could do X.