By integrating Pegasystems’ Pega Blueprint AI and AWS Transform, joint partners and customers can more effectively convert millions of lines of aging COBOL code into modern cloud applications to spur business transformation and AI adoption initiatives.
Pegasystems and Amazon Web Services have teamed up to integrate the Pega Blueprint AI application design agent into AWS Transform in a move the two IT companies say will help businesses and organizations modernize legacy mainframe applications more quickly and with less friction.
The integration will simplify efforts to move away from aging COBOL-based applications, a critical step in business transformation initiatives as enterprises look to accelerate their adoption of agentic AI systems at scale.
“This alliance is important because customers need to advance their businesses…they want to unleash AI on their business processes,” said Omri Kessel, AWS general manager, agentic AI modernization, in an interview with CRN. “They want to use that capability, but they can’t because their old system doesn’t allow them to do that.”
“If you are not advancing your tech[nology] stack, you are at a disadvantage” against other companies that aren’t burdened with the “baggage” of legacy IT, Kessel said.
The Pegasystems-AWS integration news was announced Monday at PegaWorld, Pegasystems’ annual conference in Las Vegas.
Pegasystems, headquartered in Waltham, Mass., develops Pega Infinity, a leading low-code business process management and intelligent workflow automation platform, along with sales, customer service and customer analytics applications.
In his keynote address, titled “The Business Metamorphosis: Moving From App Rigidity To Business Fluidity,” Pegasystems founder and CEO Alan Trefler spoke of the role of his company’s technology in the rapidly changing IT landscape amid the wave of AI development and adoption.
“This is an enormously fraught, enormously confusing, and enormously important time,” Trefler (pictured) said, taking a dig at AI tech vendors who promise “something magical” that would ultimately create “a utopia” that eliminates operational, administration and customer-related problems.
He pointed to the rapid turnover in large language models that disrupt AI agents vendors and businesses have developed. And he noted that “AI can generate massive, massive, massive amounts of code”—a contrast to his early days when he participated in developer contests where the goal was to write programs with the fewest number of code lines.
He touted Pegasystems’ technology as a way to “organize the AI, organize the code, and organize the agents” so they bring all this under control and “achieve predictable outcomes.”
The Pegasystems-AWS Combination
Pega Blueprint is an AI-powered design tool that combines generative AI with industry best practices to design workflows, businesses and data models. (Pega Blueprint AI Application Design Agent is the generative AI engine that powers Pega Blueprint.)
AWS Transform, meanwhile, is the cloud giant’s agentic AI service that’s designed to accelerate cloud migration, modernize legacy applications and “reduce [the] technical debt” of delayed IT improvements, according to an AWS description. AWS Transform analyzes COBOL code and generates full documentation that captures business rules, logic, processes and data structures.
Moving off legacy COBOL systems can be costly and involve time-consuming, labor-intensive discovery tasks. In many cases legacy applications consist of millions of lines of COBOL code and decades of undocumented logic, Kessel said during the Monday keynote and repeated in the CRN interview.
While some companies take a “lift and shift” approach and move legacy applications to cloud platforms, Kessel said that doesn’t address the need to modernize the business logic and business requirements behind the old applications.
“What’s relevant is to modernize the application,” Kessel said.
That can be a challenge because many of these applications were developed in the last century and most of the people who developed and understood the code are generally long gone, he said.
“We want to return in time and understand the specifications for that software, the requirements for the software,” Kessel said.
Legacy Code Analysis
Using AWS Transform, developers and business transformation teams can analyze millions of lines of original source code, perform application discovery and business rules extraction, build models of how the software behaves and the data it utilizes, and gain a better understanding of the original intent behind legacy software.
Pega Blueprint AI then takes the AWS Transform output and uses it to “autonomously generate future-state, cloud-ready application designs without leaving the AWS Transform interface,” according to the Pegasystems announcement.
The results of those “reverse engineering” steps, Kessel said, assist when “forward engineering” or modernizing the application.
Kessel said solution providers, strategic service providers and systems integrators that partner with AWS and Pegasystems will benefit from the AWS Transform-Pega Blueprint AI integration by accelerating application modernization and business transformation projects.
“We significantly improve the chances of successfully delivering a business outcome to customers that meet their expectation. We also, for the partner, significantly reduce the cost of doing [those projects],” Kessel said.
The integration work is complete, Kessel said, and Pega Blueprint AI is now available with AWS Transform.
