IT leaders need to weigh the desire for new, exciting innovations with technical debt and critical legacy applications accumulated by their business.
Many legacy systems continue to provide value to businesses, and as Jeremiah Stone, SnapLogic's CTO, noted while speaking with Computer Weekly at the company's Integreat event in London on Tuesday, the biggest challenge is that most legacy system modernization is a business-neutral activity. Often enormous amounts of time and energy have been invested into these systems.
“They have become the operational backbone of the business, and in an ideal world you would never have to update or upgrade them because they are curated and loved and put in a position where the business can use them,” he said.
According to Stone, the big challenge facing IT leaders is what he calls “harsh reality.” Either business requirements have changed, meaning legacy IT systems no longer work the way the business wants, or new tools and technologies have emerged that may not work well with legacy systems.
It can be argued that artificial intelligence (AI), which is the focus of the Integreat conference, is one of those technologies that does not fit well with legacy IT.
In a presentation at the event, Ralf Schundelmeier, head of enterprise data and platforms at Boehringer Ingelheim, outlined how the German pharmaceutical firm has adapted to support artificial intelligence. “AI needs data,” he said. “Without data, there is no AI. You need good data, and you need to prepare it for AI.”
Boehringer Ingelheim's AI and data strategy is based on the integration of self-service and self-service data. The company is a SnapLogic customer and has used the platform to support its data strategy called Data Land.
Discussing the strategy, Ingelheim said: “We are a very old company and have been collecting data for a long time. Some of this data is from legacy systems that are very difficult to access. Most of it does not have application programming interfaces. The data is not catalogued.”
The company used SnapLogic to Unlock Data Sourcescreating an enterprise-wide data warehouse.
SnapLogic, which has undergone several changes in IT architecture, effectively provides modern middleware to connect data sources and enable enterprise application integration. “Most of the systems we deal with were first delivered between 1995 and 2006,” Stone said.
During this time in the technology industry, several distributed computing models, such as service-oriented architecture and systems, were launched on-premises, meaning that enterprise applications were developed before the advent of the cloud computing era. Despite the shift to public clouds and software as a service, much of the technology stack remains on-premises.
“I don’t think we’ve even moved 50% of enterprise workloads to the cloud yet,” he added.
But modernization is necessary. Enterprises are increasingly looking for ways to accelerate digital transformation and control costs while upgrading legacy systems, according to Betsy Burton, vice president of research at Aragon Research.
Given AI's need for data, SnapLogic is positioning itself as an agent-based integration company. With many enterprise data sources running on legacy systems, the company sees an opportunity to help its clients integrate these legacy IT systems into their AI strategies. Now the company has introduced a tool called SnapLogic Intelligent Modernizer, which it claims can make it easier to migrate legacy workloads.
