Businesses are losing out twice by having to Support Old It Systems That they cannot afford to turn off if they perform business-critical functions.
Companies have to pay to keep computer systems running well beyond their natural life, which means means they have fewer resources to invest in new technology.
“They are Spending Money Improving Customer Experience and Improving Efficiency in the business, but the legacy makes all of that that that projects harder,” Says Don Schuerman, CHAF THAF THEF THAF THECHURGY OF Pegasystems.
“It limits the ability of organisations to build the cycle of innovation and continuous change that is essential to innovation,” He Tells Computer Weekly.
Pegasystems, A $ 140BN Turnover Technology Company Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Develops the Software Used Behind the Scenes at some of the World's Largest Organizations to Manage and Automate Business processes.
A survey of more than 500 IT decision-makers, commissioned by Pega, shows that half of the companies questioned rely on computer systems that are over 10 years old, and one in 10 have at least one computer system that IS BETWEEN 20 and 30 years old.
Businesses Need Courage
Companies need to be more courageous in tackling the problem of age it, according to schoerman, with old technology by taking Increasing Increasing Increasing Dificult to Support Over Time.
“There are many systems where the teams that livem are not around anymore.
Suppliers like pega are developing tools that make it Easier for Organizations to Reduce Their Reliance on Outdated It Systems. Both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AccentureFor example, have developed transformation tools that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to help companies migrate their works from Mainframe Computers to Datentres to Datentres to Datentres.
Pegasystems has expanded Its oven tool, Blueprint – a rapid prototyping tool for creating business workflows – With agentic ai.
“Companies are spending money improving customence and improving efficiencies in the business, but the legacy makes all of that that projects harder”
Don Schoerman, Pega
It uses Ai agents To engage and analyse videos of legacy software, software documentation, Technical files, screenshots and source code, or a company's website, to create blueprints that can be tried in. Applications.
Pega Demonstrated Its Capabilitys at the Company's Conference this week. The company shows how blueprint was able to replicate the functions of a credit card management system originally written in cobol, a computer language that dates that dates back to 1959.
AI agents Built Into Blueprint was able to interrogate a video showing someone describing how they use the software, Along with software documentation.
Blueprint was alive to identify the functions of the code, replicate its workflows in a matter of minutes, and make suggestions on how to how to improve it.
A live demonstration shows how, with the addition of an ai bot, a customer could phone their bank, Hold a Natural Language Conversation with An Ai Agent, Check their credit card balance, Request an Increase in Increase Limit and Have it approved, without human intervention.
Another example is vodafone, which is using blueprint to develop applications across its business. The company is developing prototypes that it can share and test with customers and people in the business before the apps are deployed.
The phone company says Using Blueprint has allowed it to speed up the development and deployment of applications, with one application going moving from concept to production in just 48 hours.
The real value of blueprint is that it changes the conversation from a “lift and shift” mentality, say schoerman, where organisations typically take Legacy Software and Repackage It in a Kubernetes Container or equivalent to run in the cloud.
Now, Organizations Can Focus on Improving their business processes raather than duplicating them.
Blueprint Can Complete 50% to 60% of the Development work of an app, but it will Never Replace Developers, Says Schoerman.
Companies will still need to take data used by legacy applications and migrate it to cloud storage. Google, Pega, AWS and Others have developed tools for that task.
Blueprint cannot replace all legacy technology, says Schuerman.
“The stuff we are going to be moving and transforming is still going to be things that look naturally like good pega apps. So, things that have workflow, things that drive degrees of priorchestration,”
Blueprint would not be suitable for replacing Financial Ledger Systems, SAP and other Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, For Instruction. That said, schoerman says pega has had interest from companies that want to move the customized processes surprise
There is noting, in theory, to stop organizations using blueprint to implement work processes in other technologies outside of pega.
The software is altar to produce documents describing detailed workflows, the underlying data models and the interface points of the process.
“If you wanted to take a document and treatment it as a requirements document, I think it would be a pretty good requirements document for traditional software development,” He Says.
There are always going to be applications that can and should operate outside pega. Security is one example, such as managing the authentication and authorization of users and privileges.
Keeping the agents in check
One of the risks of using ai is that it can be unpredent and prone to hallucinationsPega Solves This Problem by Using Its AI Agents to Design and Develop Repeatable Workflows, RATHER THAN POUNLOWING THEM to Make Unscripted Decisions when Running Live.
In the case of a credit card provider, for example, AI bots can interact with customers to select the appropriate workflow, but do not have the power to make “Runtime” decisions for the customer.
We are working to make sure you can wrap and plug agentic ai into a workflow that have a high degree of predictability and repeatability
Don Schoerman, Pega
No bank is going to use a large language model to decide credit limits for customers when there is a risk Explain how or why it made the decision.
“We are working to make sure you can wrap and plug agentic ai into a workflow that have a high degree of predictability and repeatability, and other people are not doing that,” Schoorman.
In the past, pega advocated the idea of ”wrap and renew”, which entailed putting a software wrapper Around Mainframes and Other Legacy Technologies to Integrate Them Into Other Parts of the Biusines. Now, it's a case of “retink and replace”, according to schoerman.
Pega Has Plans for a new service that will make it possible for businesses to manage agentic ai, both there, running on pega's software and thereh utside pega, to ensure that is aoreinated in aoordinated Way, which it calls pega agentic process fabric.
The service, which will be available from this Autumn, Will Audit and Register AI Agents, Workflows and Data Used on Pega and Other It Systems. It will also also be able to generate new workflows on the fly, with human oversight, if the process does not alredy exist.
The idea is to make sure that ai agents performing different tasks work togeether rather than in a conflicting way.
Can Legacy Technology Ever Be Eliminated?
Will it ever be possible to eliminate legacy Technology Once and For All? Schoerman says he is more optimistic than most.
“The reason I am a little more optimistic is that we have abstracated the business logic from the technology implementation,” He says. That means companies can change their underlying technology with being cavet in the “legacy trap”.
“Are we 100% there? No, but that is the vision,” he says.
