The Enterprise Alchemists
The Enterprise Alchemists is a new podcast for Enterprise Architects to have honest and in-depth conversations about what is relevant to our world. Expert guests provide additional context on the topics of the day in Enterprise IT.
Your hosts, Guy Murphy and Dominic Wellington, are Enterprise Architects at SnapLogic, with more decades of experience between them than they care to admit to, and the stories that go with it.
The Enterprise Alchemists
Legacy System Integration: Modernization with AI Innovations
Can outdated systems silently threaten the very core of your business? This episode, Guy and Dominic welcome the expert insights of Simona Todoroska from IWConnect to discuss the pressing issues surrounding legacy system integration and migration. Simona sheds light on how the historical reluctance to engage with legacy systems has created significant challenges for modern enterprises. We dive into the critical need for businesses to reevaluate their existing technologies to ensure they are future-ready, scalable, and secure. The conversation also delves into the risks of neglecting modernization, emphasizing how catastrophic failures in outdated systems could lead to dire consequences.
The discussion dives into the complexities of migrating from legacy systems to modern integration platforms, highlighting the challenges enterprises face when clinging to outdated technologies. Through real-world examples and a discussion on the importance of automation and AI in the migration process, we present practical strategies for successful transformation.
• Exploring the tension around updating legacy systems
• Understanding the risks of relying on outdated technology
• Discussing the role of automation in migrations
• Demonstrating the significance of the analysis phase
• Introducing AI agents Pete and Alex for improving documentation
• Highlighting the NL2SQL functionality for user empowerment
• Emphasising the importance of upfront analysis for success
Pete: https://iwconnect.com/virtual-assistant-pete/
Alex: https://iwconnect.com/alex-virtual-storytelling-agent/
NL to SQL: https://iwconnect.com/natural-language-to-sql-generator/
Find more details and a full transcript on SnapLogic's Integration Nation community site.
Hi and welcome back to the Enterprise Alchemists, a podcast from SnapLogic for enterprise architects and people interested in architecture. I'm joined by my co-host, as ever, Guy Murphy. Hey, Guy!
Guy Murphy:Good morning Dominic!
Dominic Wellington:And this week we also have with us Simona Todoroska from IWConnect, our valued partner, and I'm not saying that just to be polite. Hi, Simona, Thanks for joining us.
Simona Todoroska:Hi Dominic, Hi Guy, Thank you guys for having me.
Dominic Wellington:Absolute pleasure. Do you want to quickly introduce what you do at IWConnect for our listeners, who may not be already aware?
Simona Todoroska:Yes, indeed. So I'm Simona. As Dominic already introduced me, I'm a solution manager slash architect in IWConnect, but as well managing our European side of the business. If you will, that means indeed wearing too many hats, but I'm kind of bridging the gap between technology and business, which is basically trying to enable technology for resolving real world problems for our clients. So yeah, that's me.
Dominic Wellington:Fantastic. And yes, if you've been at the SnapLogic events at the end of last year, then you'll have seen the IWConnect booth, and if you missed out talking to them, then it's well worth checking out their website. We'll put that in the show notes. Guy
Dominic Wellington:, why don't you lead us off? Because you had some questions you particularly wanted to talk about with Simona.
Guy Murphy:Yeah, no, absolutely so for our listeners. Sometimes I probably keep on referring to the past, and this podcast is not going to be different. Just quickly wanted to touch upon a couple of trends that we're seeing in the marketplace that aren't hot and sexy and aren't always going to directly link to AI, though actually that is changing.
Guy Murphy:If you look at about 10-12 years ago, with the rise of the iPaaS platforms in the marketplace, we saw a very interesting dynamic and I was there with some of the early platforms in that space in which the vendors themselves actively avoided dealing with legacy. It was for lots of good reasons, sometimes commercial reasons and sometimes the scale and the complexity of dealing with this, and that was fine. That allowed the ipass marketplace to accelerate at pace into the marketplace, develop new hybrid architectures, but it kind of left an iceberg in many enterprise architecture strategies because of this disinterest. And what's been interesting is in the last two or three years we've definitely seen the rising concern of this from our customers in SnapLogic, because basically many of these platforms are coming to end a life or they're becoming fundamental bottlenecks to innovation, because often they are sitting there with thousands, tens of thousands. We even have one client in North America, with hundreds of thousands of integration patterns sitting inside of, effectively, black box legacy. Simone, is this something that you're starting to see happen around your clients?
Simona Todoroska:Yes, yes, indeed, you are pretty much on point, Guy, about the statement of previously potentially vendors avoiding migration, and there is a reason for it, right, it's basically one of the hardest projects are the migration projects. You usually get the questions such as why fix something that is already working or it's not broken if you will.
Dominic Wellington:If it ain't broken, don't mess with it. That's a safe rule.
Simona Todoroska:Yeah, that's right, it works. No one knows how, no one knows behind the scenes what's going on, but it it works. No one knows how, no one knows behind the scenes what's going on, but it just works, and usually it's. How do you win on that one and basically try to migrate out of it? And I've recently watched the BlackBerry movie, which is basically a migration, if you will, from, let's say, a smartphone that was working right. Nothing was wrong with BlackBerry, but when iPhone came into the picture, it completely changed the world. So basically it's kind of a similar comparison and usually what I ask our customers is when they say, no, but that works, that works well.
Simona Todoroska:I ask them a few questions that pretty much they should ask themselves, if you will. A few of those are basically is the solution really future ready? Is it really scalable? Is it according all of the security standards that you need to have? Is your current integration platform just working? Or basically it's driving your business forward? So they may be missing a lot of opportunities just because of you know this works. It doesn't really matter. But on the other side, I completely understand that for a manager it's very hard to take a migration project First. Who will fund it. It works, so let's just don't touch it. Also, a lot of people left. Documentation may not be there, so figuring out the as-is state is the hardest part of it. And then the migration itself happens afterwards. But figuring out the as-is state has been a lot of challenge so far.
Dominic Wellington:And that is precisely it, isn't it. You know that it's working, but if it ever breaks, then you don't have the people who originally built it available. You don't have good docs, almost certainly, so that would be bad, but that's hypothetical. That hasn't happened yet and until it happens. Cross your fingers and hope. Is that about the size of it?
Simona Todoroska:Yeah, pretty much. Yes, you're, you're completely right, and but when it happens, it's a complete catastrophe for the whole company because they're relying on it quite a lot.
Guy Murphy:As our listeners can hear, we're all in violent agreement with each other. I think one of the accelerators, especially in EMEA I'm starting to see, is finally the shift in the SAP install base, because with the SAP decision to extend support, they kind of kicked their own migration strategy down the line. But now I'm seeing that manufacturing retail in store base across Europe is starting to move to their new cloud platforms and this is forcing a clear look inside of the legacy processes and suddenly the legacy integrations become a critical issue, because I can think of at least two accounts I've spoken to in the last six months where they it's not just integration patterns that have embedded in these systems, but actually business logic. And again, at that point your migration is even more complex than just point to point integration. Simone, so when you work with your clients you talked about the questioning how do you go about it? Because I'm sure you're not just sitting there with an army of millions hand analyzing everything, because that's been tried and that's been failing for the last 25 years in the marketplace.
Simona Todoroska:Yeah, that's right. Indeed, what we are trying to do as an approach and as a project, usually approaching immigration is basically use or reuse our knowledge that we've gained so far. What I mean by it is not really the people knowledge, but as well automation behind the scenes that we've built through the years. So let me give you an example of one successful migration project that we have done previously. So it was for a big telco company. Those guys had relying on Cisco Service Grid. It's an old legacy integration platform for integrating ITSM integrations. So basically those guys used the Cisco Service Grid to integrate their clients onto their ITSM, where they will open them incidents, cases, problems I mean the standard ITSM story. Now, that was working for more than 10 years for them, and they've implemented it with the multiple consultancies, companies, different vendors and whatnot, and documentation of course wasn't there.
Simona Todoroska:Nothing was really existing, and figuring out the as-is state was the basically hardest part to do, as I mentioned. So reverse engineering was one of the first thing that we kind of do, but not with people but with technology. So basically, what we have leveraged is acceleration of migration, which we are trying to kind of build as a strategy. What that means is basically, we build these accelerators, or speeding up tools that are speeding up the migration, which are actually analyzing the as-is state. Give you the as-is state as a report, meaning what is there, how complex are your integrations, how much of those can be reused, how much is future-ready architecture in your new platform?
Simona Todoroska:We were migrating this to SnapLogic, so basically the analysis phase was almost fully automated.
Simona Todoroska:It gave us the report of what can be automated, what really needs to be rebuilt by manual work and what needs to be changed from architecture perspective, and also gave us documentation of the as-is state. Once we've kind of deployed or used the accelerator, we already kind of did half of the job and then we kind of planned the migration, which is always, you know, a big bank, is not something that you would like to do. This was working for more than 10 years, so let's make sure that it will work once you migrate as well. So we planned the phases based on the report that this accelerator gave us and basically we achieved the numbers which, if we compare it to the traditional way of migrating, which we want to avoid as to your point, guy way of migrating, which we want to avoid To your point, guy we got numbers such as 65, I think it was the actual number of speed of delivery that we've overcome with this acceleration, and that's an important factor to point out that this analysis phase is actually the most important part of the whole operation.
Dominic Wellington:It's not the implementing the new thing. That part's easy. And to underline that point, I recently dealt with the aftermath of a failed migration. Someone else not IWConnect, I hasten to add had been into this customer and had migrated from Informatica Power Center to SnapLogic, but what they'd done was just a straight up lift and shift. They didn't really think about the semantics of how things are done in these two rather different platforms, and so they'd replicated exactly what had been done in Informatica, but that was far from being the best way of doing things in SnapLogic, so they were having terrible performance problems and we ended up having to redo almost all of that work. So that analysis phase is so crucial to getting a good result at the end.
Simona Todoroska:Yeah, you are completely right, Dominic, and indeed we have been dealing with Informatica Power Center as well, migrations to different integration platforms, and these accelerators that we've built, including the Informatica Power Center 1, actually are overcoming that gap, are overcoming that gap when I say this is basically analysis phase.
Simona Todoroska:Yes, figuring out the as-is state as the most important part and then deciding basically what is a lift and shift, really, what you can do, such as, I don't know, maybe mappings, converting into the respective, let's say, mappings in the new platform, but the actual architecture, or compressing the flows or making it future ready for the platform that you've chosen to use. Going forward is the most important part and for it, in this accelerator, we do use AI and Gen AI as part of these accelerators where, let's say, with AI, we do this kind of automated system analysis, if you will, and mapping the future integration architecture, and with Gen AI, we basically get the documentation of the as-is state and potentially getting the migration strategy as a suggested one or a project plan, if you will. So that's how we do it.
Guy Murphy:So, Simona, you've been talking about the external tools and your processes. Have there been any aspects of the SnapLogic platform you found useful as obviously a candidate platform for dealing with these sorts of strategic projects?
Simona Todoroska:Yes, indeed. I mean I've been working with SnapLogic for, I think around a decade now, and SnapLogic when I started and SnapLogic now it's a completely different platform which I always want to say we evolved together. So I mean I have been working with Tipco, mulesoft, snaplogic and all of those platforms. You name it citizen integrator approach as something that really is in the sense of the actual word. When I say this is basically I've did the comparisons of multiple platforms, I've did, let's say, sometimes a customer doesn't know what platform they would like to use and usually we do the matching.
Simona Todoroska:Of course, not for every use case. Every platform is really applicable. But once you do the let's say comparisons and what are the strengths and what are the really incorporating another tool or code or anything to kick off a project, even a migration one, because in these accelerators, a lot of behind the scenes is SnapLogic itself. Behind the scenes is SnapLogic itself. When I say this is basically a lot of these accelerators contain SnapLogic pipelines that are doing the conversion. Not every tool can do that and not it's to spin up. Basically, these accelerators with SnapLogic so far in my experience has been the most powerful, let's say, thing to do going forward and with it the client doesn't really need to install anything. They don't need to do anything on their legacy platform or servers, but actually just, let's say, potentially use SnapLogic as their new platform. So that's I will take as a major win usually in all of my migration projects using SnapLogic.
Dominic Wellington:I love that you jumped straight to the ease of use there, because sometimes when we talk about the no-code nature of the snap logic platform, people assume that that means it's only suitable for simple use cases. But you're actually coming in as platform experts. You know this, this platform, deeply. You're trying to accomplish pretty complex tasks and still it's the first thing that you jump to is there the ease of use. It just makes it really easy to get stuff done.
Simona Todoroska:You think about it, you do the analysis, as we were talking about before, but when you're trying to to do the work and get people to adopt it, that's the important factor yes, indeed, and uh, especially for for migration projects, uh, as such, uh, the let's say the, the client where you are trying to do the migration will always ask you but I have a team that already knows this platform how would I do the transition and training? And that's really one of the, let's say, important stuff with Simplogic, because the training and the intuitiveness of it really really comes at ease for almost every customer that we had so far.
Guy Murphy:Cool. Thank you very much for sharing that.
Dominic Wellington:So you mentioned before that you used AI and Gen AI in the migration process and the analysis phase, but people who've seen the IW Connect booth at events like SnapLogic Zone Integrate will also have noticed that you talk about Pete the virtual assistant. He's also all over your LinkedIn. Do you want to explain a little bit more about Pete and Alex and the agents that you built and where they come in?
Simona Todoroska:Yes, yeah, and thank you for the question, Dominic. So, indeed, Pete and Alex are agents that we have built using AI, gen, ai, and I mean kind of our experience so far. How we come up with these agents is basically resolving an issue for us. We had documentation was always like, as we all know, developers doesn't really like to write documentation, doesn't really like to do any how to say maintenance of it, if you will and we kind of tried to bridge that gap and save that time, but as well have an updated documentation all the time. Going back to the migration, this is really important. So we've built initially PEAT as an agent. It wasn't really taught as such, it was built. It was even called, I believe, IWDG or something which was IW Document Generator.
Dominic Wellington:Very catchy!
Simona Todoroska:Very catchy indeed, and basically it was something like a pet project for us to help internally, for us to not write documentation, to help our customers not, let's say, billing hours, if you will, to them for writing documentation, and try to automate that as much as possible. And once we've shared that with multiple clients, this is how we do documentation everyone was like can we have that? How do you do it? Can we have it? So then we kind of grouped and thought about it how we can productize this, let's say, project. So that was a few years ago when things were a little bit different and AI wasn't really that much of a hype. But we've even done now. We've been using it the traditional one and trying to basically have something that will keep your documentation up to date, to make your support teams aware of what is going on within your integration layer and having the documentation always in front of you. It works, for it documents everything on confluence. It works with SharePoint as well. You can also download PDFs if that's your way of documentation. But that's not just. That's not just it.
Simona Todoroska:With Pete Now we have added multiple features. One of them is a code review, and what we're trying to make with Pete is basically making your compliance expert compliance expert, if you will. So the code review as well was kind of a gap that we've tried to bridge with Pete, because it was always a challenge of how you do a code review, what is the process, how that works, and with every client that's different. It's conversations and meetings and whatnot, and with this, basically you have it automated. It analyzes the integrations built in SnapLogic. It gives you a report of your environment, health, how that looks like at the moment, what you need potentially to fix, what is a warning and what is a complete error, if you will, something that you want to allow in production. And our whole idea is basically you just put the API of it in your CI/CD and it kind of blocks a deployment if your code is not on the level where you want it to be.
Dominic Wellington:I love how we've come full circle. We said that the problem statement for many customers of yours for migrations is that they don't have any documentation of what's been built, and so the first thing they're going to build with the Gen AI features is something to generate docs, so you don't have that problem in the future. So you're not just solving the immediate problem but setting the customers up to have to rinse and repeat a few years into the future, but you're actually giving them something that's going to help them structurally.
Simona Todoroska:Yes, yes indeed, and it's basically nothing that you will need to do with it. It's basically a click of a button, or even you can. You can just put it as an automation within your layer, so it's not like you have a bot and you ask it, but it's more like a. It's a, it's an agent behind the scenes that does that work for you and that's something else I'm seeing as the gen ai market matures.
Dominic Wellington:Initially, everyone wanted to build a chatbot and that was all everyone was thinking about, and now we're seeing more and more of these features as kind of just in the background. They're working automatically. They can be called by an API so you can integrate them within workflows. It's just becoming seamless and that is, I think, a much more mature approach, because lots of things it's exciting once to talk to a chat bot, but you wouldn't want to spend your whole day in a chat interface asking very verbose questions, so you just, you know, figure it out, Machine gets on with it.
Simona Todoroska:Yeah, you're completely right, and Alex, the other agent, is basically doing a similar job from that standpoint. However, that's a little bit more on the almost let's say almost every company uses Scrum Masters, follows an Agile approach of development and what Alex does is basically playing Scrum Master in a way where it automatically does the storytelling for you. It gives you a complete spin-up of all of the epic stories for anything that you are trying to build and basically what it does is learns from your environment and your platform so it can be better and better every day and have, let's say, create for you all of the stories boards in JIRA or Azure DevOps so you can speed up the whole development process.
Dominic Wellington:But speaking of things that do perhaps work better as a chatbot, there's also the other feature that you built, the natural language to SQL query generation. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because SQL queries, once you get beyond the trivial, that's also a big migration pain, and so it's maybe worth talking about those for a minute as well.
Simona Todoroska:Yeah, yeah, sure, I mean. Worth mentioning is all of these things we are implementing and continue to implement. This is just a few examples that we have done right, and NL2SQL also came as, let's say, a resolution of a problem that we have, or our customers have, and we're trying to make their lives easier. What that does, indeed, is a chatbot in a way, where you ask it questions and, directly behind us, it generates you a complex queries, store procedures or, let's say, best way for querying your data sets. What that does is basically you have a simple interface of a chatbot and you ask it I don't know.
Simona Todoroska:You are, let's say, a retailer where you have different products and you want to get the info of which product generates you the most revenue, and basically that's what you ask which product does give me the most revenue in the last month? So, behind the scenes, it does querying of your data warehouse, of all your info, where you have all the data, and gives you an output of basically a text where it says I don't know, these sneakers are the ones that generate you the most revenue. So, behind the scenes, imagine how big of a query is that merging multiple tables, depending how you have your data warehouse built, of course, but this is basically used for our customers that want the business users to get their data really fast without really needing to go to the data team and ask them to make them a report or whatnot. With these bots, they can easily figure out what's going on within their enterprise.
Dominic Wellington:And going back to empowering the users and citizen integration once again. And also I love that you've mentioned two AI and Gen AI use cases, and both times, almost your first statement was we had a problem and we wanted to solve it this way, and I hear far too many people saying we wanted to do something with AI and we went looking for an excuse to use the cool tech, and those tend not to end particularly well.
Dominic Wellington:I was shoehorning the tech into the use case when it should be very much the other way around. You start with the use case, start with the end in mind. We want to make it easier to generate documentation or sql queries, or what have you. This ai tech looks like it would solve the problem, but you have to have the understanding of the problem first yeah, correct, correct, you're completely right and problems are usually repeating.
Simona Todoroska:For most of the customers, I mean, no matter in which industry or what technology they use, problems are very, very similar and once we see, let's say, a recurring problem, we are trying to resolve it and trying to automate it. Before the AI world, it would be an automation some of the things and you would call it automation. Now, everything is AI, which not necessarily. I agree. You need to kind of make the differentiation what is really an automation and where you would use AI, what is really an automation and where you would use use ai? Because even before ai, automation was there and we've been leveraging it a lot to to overcome a lot of problems love it, the analysis phase.
Dominic Wellington:Just as we said in the beginning, it's always that it always comes down to analyzing the problem, understanding really how to solve it yeah, yeah, that's right I think that's a great place to leave it.
Dominic Wellington:So thank you so much for your time, simona. This has been an interesting conversation for me. I hope the audience also found it interesting. As a reminder, if someone sent you this as a standalone, it's a series that you can subscribe to look for the Enterprise Alchemists, wherever good podcasts are downloaded, and there is also a companion website that's under the Integration Nation forum where you can find the full transcripts and also the comment thread. If you have any thoughts, we are always eager to hear from our listeners, but for now, thank you once again, simona.
Simona Todoroska:Thank you, thank you guys, thank you for having me.
Dominic Wellington:And thank you to our listeners. This concludes this season of the Enterprise Alchemists, but we will be back soon. Watch this space. Until then, thank you once again.
