IT leaders need to weigh up the drive to adopt new, exciting innovation with the technical debt and mission-critical legacy applications their business has accumulated.
Many legacy systems continue to deliver business value, and as Jeremiah Stone, chief technology officer at SnapLogic, noted during a conversation with Computer Weekly at the company’s Integreat event in London on Tuesday, the biggest pain point of all is that most legacy modernisation is a business value neutral exercise. Often, these systems have had a tremendous amount of time and energy put into them.
“They’ve become the operational backbone of the business, and in a perfect world, you would never have to upgrade or modernise them because they’ve been curated and loved, and put into a position where the business can run upon them,” he said.
According to Stone, a big problem facing IT leaders is what he calls “the hard reality”. Either business requirements have changed, which means legacy IT no longer works the way the business wants to operate, or there are new tools and technologies, which may not work well with legacy systems.
Arguably, artificial intelligence (AI) – the main focus of the Integreat conference – is one of those technologies that does not play well with legacy IT.
In a presentation held at the event, Ralf Schundelmeier, head of enterprise data and platforms at Boehringer Ingelheim, discussed how the German pharmaceutical firm has adapted to support AI. “AI needs data,” he said. “Without data, there is no AI. You need good data and you need to get your data AI-ready.”
Boehringer Ingelheim’s AI and data strategy is based on self-service integration 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 we’ve been collecting data for a long time. Some of this data is on legacy systems that are very hard to get to. Most of them don’t have application programming interfaces. Data is not catalogued.”
The company used SnapLogic to unlock data sources, creating an enterprise-wide data vault.
SnapLogic, which has lived through a number of IT architectural shifts, effectively provides modern middleware, to connect data sources and enable enterprise application integration. “Most of the systems we’re dealing with were first shipped between the years of 1995 and 2006,” said Stone.
Over this time in the tech industry, several models for distributed computing, such as the service-oriented architecture and systems, were run on-premise, which means enterprise applications were engineered before the era of cloud computing. In spite of the shift to public clouds and software as a service, much of the technology stack remains on-premise.
“I don’t think we’ve even passed 50% of enterprise workloads in the cloud yet,” he added.
But there is a need to modernise. According to Betsy Burton, vice-president of research at Aragon Research, enterprises are increasingly seeking ways to accelerate digital transformation and control expenses while updating legacy systems.
Given AI’s appetite for data, SnapLogic is positioning itself as the agentic integration company. Since there are plenty of enterprise data troves running in legacy systems, the company sees an opportunity to help its customers integrate these legacy IT systems into their AI strategies. It has now introduced a tool called SnapLogic Intelligent Modernizer, which it claims can streamline legacy workload migration.
