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What is a Legacy System and Why is Everyone So Worried About Them?

Are legacy systems really the end of the world? For many companies, they are business-critical technologies that keep operations humming and revenue flowing. But for all the bad press they get, you might think they’re set to be the downfall of business as we know it. 

Are they? Not necessarily. Can they be? Absolutely.

But to fully understand what legacy systems are and why everyone is so concerned about them, we’ll have to dig a little deeper. This post will look at what a legacy system is, provide some examples, and examine the value, risks, and challenges associated with them.

Before we can discuss the risks and challenges associated with a legacy system, we have to establish what we’re talking about. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a widely accepted definition of legacy systems – which can make it challenging to determine if it’s an issue at your organization. 

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>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

What is a Legacy System?

Legacy systems include computer systems, programming languages, applications, processes, or hardware that are:

  • Inefficient to support or maintain
  • Based on outdated technology
  • Not compatible with more modern technical solutions
  • Typically no longer available for purchase
  • Often essential for day-to-day operations (more on this later)

Pro Tip: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a system or tool isn’t “legacy” because it’s only a few years old. Any technology that fits the above criteria is considered a legacy system.

Legacy Technology Examples and Use Cases

Legacy systems are everywhere. Any business that existed before fully-digital companies began emerging has had to – or will have to – update older systems if they want to compete in today’s digital space. Aging infrastructure and outdated technology comes in all shapes and sizes, but here are four more well-known legacy technology examples:

1. On-Premise SharePoint

Microsoft has announced the end of life for its 2013, 2016, and 2019 SharePoint Servers, with the final lights set to go out in July 2026. Research suggests that a significant percentage of finance, government, healthcare, and manufacturing organizations in North America are still using this tool – and many have no plans to migrate to something else.

Once considered ground-breaking, the on-premise version of SharePoint has become challenging (and expensive) to customize. It doesn’t scale well and lacks many reporting and oversight capabilities that are now considered standard.

2. COBOL

If you’re connected to the financial sector, you’ve probably been hearing arguments about COBOL for at least a decade. This programming language has been around for over 60 years and powers billions of ATM and credit card transactions annually.

COBOL’s age is not the issue. Skilled developers are already in short supply, and those with the expertise to translate COBOL code into more widely used modern languages are even more scarce. Even experienced developers can find it challenging to translate COBOL because of the unorthodox way it uses some standard coding statements.

3. SAP’s On-Premise ERP

Like SharePoint, SAP has announced plans to sunset support for its on-premise ERP in 2027. The existing model requires companies still using it to invest heavily in the development and maintenance of customized code to adapt it to today’s business processes. 

91% of SAP users say they are dependent on custom code, and  90% of the code in use falls somewhere between “important” and “extremely critical.” The costs to keep using the tool are already high and will only increase as new technologies and trends emerge.

4. Blackberry Phones

There was a time when 43% of smartphones in the US were Blackberries. Although the brand’s downfall was swift when it failed to adapt to changing consumer expectations driven by new models from Apple and Samsung, the company only finally announced the end of support for its operating system in January 2022.

Limits on Blackberry hardware and the company’s refusal to embrace tools that customers wanted – think keyboard in place of touch screen – cost the company market share and ultimately made the once-iconic phones obsolete.

Why Do Businesses Use Legacy Tech?

The need to replace systems that are outdated, challenging to support, and inefficient to maintain and use may seem obvious. So why do businesses resist legacy system integration and hold on to platforms and tools like the legacy technology examples listed above?

There are a number of reasons:

  • “It still works!”

This is a common refrain among executives who resist digital transformation in favor of the tools they know and trust. It can be hard to recognize (or justify) the need to overhaul major systems when the existing solution – which employees are used to – appears to be getting the job done.

  • “We can’t afford to change!”

Balancing revenue and costs is always a consideration. The price to upgrade, or worse, replace, business-critical tech is often high. In many cases, companies have invested substantially in existing systems, so bearing a slow rise in maintenance costs may seem preferable to scrapping it all and starting fresh.

  • “Changing will disrupt operations!”

Legacy systems often play a vital role in day-to-day operations, so the prospect of shifting to a new solution (whose reliability is unknown) can be daunting. If sticking with older tech might be disruptive eventually, companies may take their chances rather than endangering operational continuity with a major change.

“Replacing legacy applications and systems with systems based on new and different technologies is one of the information systems (IS) professional’s most significant challenges. As enterprises upgrade or change their technologies, they must ensure compatibility with old systems and data formats that are still in use.”

Gartner

Legacy System Risks and Challenges

Concerns about transitioning away from legacy systems are not unfounded, but the risks of sticking with outdated architecture – however “tried and true” it may be – are not inconsequential either.

Businesses that continue to rely on legacy technology will see problems related to:

  • Maintenance 

The cost of maintaining outdated systems will only rise as time goes on, support is discontinued, and fewer IT experts with the skills to keep legacy systems working – and connected to more modern tools – are available.

  • Performance

The speed at which technology evolves is increasing exponentially. Legacy systems that don’t fail outright still won’t be able to keep pace with rising standards and rapid changes to market trends and consumer demands.

  • Integration

The pandemic only accelerated an existing shift to doing business online, and a dependence on legacy systems can hamper digital transformation efforts and make adopting new solutions more challenging.

  • User Experience

Reliance on aging or outdated platforms can negatively affect the experience you offer your customers. And the brand loyalty you’ve built can only carry you so far when you can’t meet expectations.

Digibee Can Help

Digibee’s innovative low-code enterprise integration platform-as-a-service removes the roadblocks legacy systems put in the way of your company’s growth and success. 

Our reusable integrations let even junior developers connect legacy systems to new technologies and tools to modernize your architecture and accelerate digital transformation without downtime or disruption to your operations. Book a customized demo and discover the Digibee difference for yourself today.

Easily Connect the Dots Between Build, Run, and Monitor with Digibee’s Intuitive iPaaS Platform

Complex Problems = Complex Solutions.

Trying to work out all your integration business use cases is intense, and trying to get a full picture of all the platforms you need to connect to is no easier, we get it. To make sure the integration itself doesn’t add to the complexity your team faces, we’ve worked hard to create the most elegant and straightforward integration platform possible (without sacrificing the ability to adapt to tough or unique problems, we promise!). 

At Digibee we have taken a full lifecycle approach to guide your team through Building, Running, and Monitoring your integrations in a way that is intuitive and helps you “connect the dots” to see the big picture of how your integration is working in near real-time. We also understand that every company is structured a little differently, so versatility is a core attribute we have factored into every step of our integration platform.

In this blog post we give you a guided tour through our Build, Run, Monitor Digibee interface to help you visualize how our unique enterprise iPaaS can support you, however your company is structured, whatever your integration needs are, and wherever you are in your integration lifecycle.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Build Your Pipelines, Build Your Realm 

Our build platform is where it all begins. Whether your developers are creating a new integration or updating an existing one, this stage keeps all your integrations organized and easy to find. It is also where you can specify exactly who should be allowed to access each of the areas of the Digibee platform using our flexible realm structure that lets each individual see exactly what they need. 

Within a user’s realm we keep pipelines nice and organized under their respective projects, making it a snap to see where each integration is used in your business. Our intuitive drag and drop canvas coupled with Digibee capsules’ powerful pre-packaged business logic extracts the complexity out of the builds, but retains the sophistication. build-screenBuilding a new pipeline with Digibee’s low code integration platform is easy for developers to master, and to ensure their learning curve is pain-free our Platform-as-a-Service subscription includes support – so, we build these pipelines alongside your team until you’re ready to work alone.

Our Build Platform in Action:

Our work with the international shoe retailer Payless is a great example of what our build platform can accomplish, and how even though our enterprise integration platform may seem simple, it can scale up quickly to meet the biggest integration challenges. 

For Payless, Digibee was able to deliver integrations for a new e-commerce platform with more than 200+ stores in 15 countries. With the efficiency of our low-code drag-and-drop interface we built their integration solutions in less than 30 days!

Get Up and Running with 3 Quick Decisions

To help your team run your integrations going forward (without wanting to just run away), we’ve made deploying an integration as simple as these 3 quick decisions before you click ‘Deploy’;

  • What size?
  • What amount of concurrency?
  • What level of parallelism?

If your team later finds they need to adjust an integration pipeline’s size, concurrency, or level of parallelism, this can be done any time by simply going into the pipeline and updating the settings!run-screenJust like our Build platform, our Run platform’s UX keeps things visually organized and easy to understand. All the pipelines or projects a user has been granted access to appear in their realm organized under their projects. At a glance they can see key stats of each pipeline such as the deploy date, version number, and number of replicas. 

Our runtime environment is containerized – this means that your integrations aren’t sharing compute power/speed with anyone else, so even at peak times there is no drop in performance.

Our Run Process in Action:

Bauducco, the largest manufacturer of baked goods in Brazil, partnered with Digibee to help alleviate their pain points when migrating their legacy system to SAP S4/HANA. With 5 manufacturing units, 12 branches and 7 strategic distribution centers there were a lot of moving parts for Bauducco to keep on top of. Combined with various manual processes, their legacy system was difficult to run and prone to inaccuracies. 

Digibee built an enterprise iPaaS platform that effectively integrated Bauducco’s legacy system with SAP/S4 HANA while simplifying the existing SAP landscape, keeping their enterprise integration platform simple to run. Greater stability was achieved within the environment, and reduced the projected time and cost of the integration project by over 30%, all with zero downtime.

Discover New Insights with our Monitor Tools

Once an integration platform is built and running, the quality of the insights gathered through monitoring can be one of the most impactful tools in learning how to adapt and grow. Understanding this, we have designed an intuitive and powerful monitoring platform to work in conjunction with our Build/Run capabilities.

On our Monitor tab, your team can easily see at a glance how all your integrations are performing both in real-time and historically. The visual display and performance metrics make it simple to detect issues, or areas for optimization. We’ve also made error-handling more streamlined through the ability to deliver events directly to enterprise ticketing and monitoring solutions for remediation.monitor-screen

Our Monitoring Tools in Action:

Digibee partnered with Weir Group, a global mining technology leader, to create a flexible integration to support critical workflows. The work required several global corporate systems be integrated with local systems to facilitate a smooth and bi-directional flow of information through their integration platform. 

One of the items integrated was their MES (Manufacturing Execution System) which provides data and real-time insights into a company’s product manufacturing process. To ensure that the company didn’t lose any of this vital MES information, Digibee was able to implement near real-time alerts within their enterprise integration platform to flag potential integration flow issues before any disruption occurred.

Improve all phases of your Integration lifecycle with Digibee

To learn more about our intuitive Build-Run-Monitor enterprise integration solutions and how our adaptable UX empowers your team on all stages of your integration journey, take the Digibee Challenge:

Give us the integration project that you can’t get to until next year, but you need next quarter – and we’ll show you the Digibee difference by next week. 

Book your 15-minute Discovery Call, 30-minute Custom Demo, or 60-minute Deep Dive today!

3 Ways Retail IT Solutions Can Help Improve Customer Experience

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Customer experience is the key to unlocking profit in the retail industry. While keeping shoppers happy with your brand has always been a high priority for retail organizations, its importance has reached unprecedented levels.

And as economic uncertainties persist across the US and around the globe, the ability to deliver the optimum experience consumers expect in exchange for their business has become a matter of life or death for many businesses. So how do you optimize your customer’s experience – and what is the role of IT in retailing?

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>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Examining the Retail Tech Landscape

Technology is simultaneously retailers’ most powerful asset and greatest foe. Established brands face new competition from digital natives that disrupt traditional business models with direct-to-consumer options. Technological developments in every other aspect of their lives have led shoppers to demand personalized service, rapid responses, and experiences customized to their individual needs and interests.

2022 was a year of digital transformation for many retail brands, and 2023 promises more of the same as companies embrace:

  • Click and collect shopping options
  • Data-based personalization
  • Omnichannel commerce
  • Artificial intelligence and virtual reality
  • Links to external marketplaces
  • Emerging tech like NFTs and the Metaverse

Digital technology and retail have become inseparable. Brands must embrace tools that increase efficiency and personalization to meet customers where they are – or resign themselves to obsolescence.

3 Steps to Improve Customer Shopping Experience

That list of trends and advances in retail tech may seem daunting. If your brand is still struggling to balance in-person service with ecommerce and social shopping, how will you possibly leverage virtual reality or the metaverse?

One step at a time, that’s how. Regardless of where your brand currently lives on the spectrum between legacy brick-and-mortar and fully virtual, here are three key steps to help you deliver the retail customer experience your shoppers demand.

1. Modernize Your Architecture

Identify where and how your IT architecture is holding you back from leveraging new tools and trends. Is your data still locked up in silos that prevent brick-and-mortar teams from seeing how shoppers engage online? This is a major roadblock that must be moved. Ensuring all your systems are connected and communicating – a shift to cloud-based tools and applications will support this – has a significant impact on the customer experience you deliver.

GJP Hotels & Resorts knew there was a problem when customer complaints about the lengthy check-in process increased. The negative customer experience threatened the company’s future – and they took action.

The company leveraged Digibee’s eiPaaS to integrate their existing property management tools and systems with self-serve digital portals that reduced customer wait time by 80% and complaints by 100% in the first year of deployment.

 2. Empower Your Team

Maybe you’ve already started to access new retail IT solutions. But new tools often come with added deployment and maintenance requirements. Are you dependent on an external vendor to help you keep pace with digital natives? Or is the race to combine digital technology and retail putting increased load on your already overworked development team?

The IT skills shortage that developed post-pandemic is likely to persist, so a crucial part of optimizing CX is ensuring your organization can keep pace with new trends and market changes.

  • Empower your developers with tools that let them deploy and maintain integrations and data knowledge in-house
  • Adopt an IT infrastructure that delivers the agility and flexibility to leverage new opportunities
  • Rethink strategies and solutions that leave you dependent on hard-to-find talent you might not always have

3. Simplify Your Systems

There’s a reason the K.I.S.S. principle is so ubiquitous. The shift to a fully integrated commerce solution doesn’t need to be complex or costly. Low- or no-code tools and platforms make it easy to build and deploy the applications and integrations your business needs to keep systems connected and customers happy.

Payless recognized the need to integrate their ecommerce and physical stores to deliver a consistent customer experience but faced challenges dealing with disparate legal and fiscal requirements of the 15 countries they had stores in.

They came to Digibee for an integration solution that was secure, reliable, and capable of scaling to accommodate seasonal sales spikes. Digibee delivered a completely secure ecommerce solution spanning 200 stores in 15 countries in less than 30 days.

Let Digibee Boost Your Retail IT Solutions

Digibee’s enterprise iPaaS is a full life-cycle, low-code integration solution that empowers brands to embrace the retail IT solutions they need to compete. Regardless of your organization’s current IT maturity level, we can help you modernize legacy solutions and integrate systems to leverage all the latest digital tools.

Download a complimentary copy of Fully Integrated Commerce for the Modern Retailer for details on how Digibee’s enterprise iPaaS can help improve your retail customer experience online and in-person, or book a custom demo to see our solution in action.

Forrester TEI Report: Enterprise Integration for Financial Services

In a recent engagement with Forrester Consulting, we asked the experts to put hard numbers behind the value Digibee delivers to our customers. The result? The Total Economic Impact™ Of Digibee’s Integration Platform as a Service (eiPaaS) report1, a detailed examination that quantifies the upside of Digibee’s eiPaaS technology. 

In providing context to the research, Forrester conducted interviews with existing Digibee customers, taking what they learned and using it to create a composite customer: a financial services organization that we’ll call FinCo. This blog post explores in detail the total economic impact afforded to FinCo after implementing Digibee. 

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How to Gain Faster Time to Value with Your IT Integrations

Is the excitement of your IT integration starting to wear off as the months of disruption and training drag on? Selecting the right integration partner is an important decision that requires diligence, time, and patience. You may have thought that your current integration strategy would be the quickest, easiest route since you already had a relationship with your integration partner.

Now, the months-long implementation and upskilling for certification, along with your stagnant and ever-growing IT backlog may have you second-guessing your decision.

Don’t worry. Even as you continue with your current integration, there is a way to stay on top of your regular workload, burn your IT backlog and get faster time to value for your IT integrations. Here’s how.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Press Fast-Forward: How to Reduce Time to Market with Digibee’s iPaaS

There are many financial benefits to enterprise integration and employing Digibee’s enterprise iPaaS, such as the cost saving of being able to use more junior developers, but beyond that there are also sizable financial gains to be made through speed, namely the benefits of a faster time to revenue through a faster product release cycle.

A recently-conducted Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of Digibee Report provided an opportunity for a third-party assessment that systematically explored the outcomes of partnering with Digibee for enterprise Integration. Using a composite organization modeled on the characteristics of interviewees’ organizations, this TEI report attributed +$1.3M of the +$5.9M total benefits Present Value (PV) to allowing a faster time to market for new products and services – that’s over one-fifth of total monetary benefits!

How Data Analytics Integration with EI Support Retail Demand Forecasting

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Retail information systems must find a way to work as a conduit between the digital world and the physical world, a real challenge when both are constantly changing in different ways.

On one end, the customer expects a quick, easy, personalized omnichannel experience from the comfort of their couch, on the other end your retail IT solutions have to not only provide that, but then also provide a fast and seamless delivery of the physical items they bought, even if it’s 200 pounds of Italian marble for their kitchen counter. 

Every physical product requires raw materials, manufacturing, and then shipping to (at a minimum) the end user. As there is no way around incurring these costs, ending up with excess inventory can quickly become a major expense.

But since this manufacturing process also takes more time than a customer would be willing to wait, in most cases it has to be completed prior to a client’s order, meaning a retailer again ends up in a challenging position where they risk having too much or too little on-hand. In this way, accurate retail demand forecasting is essential for preserving your bottom line.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

How Integration Capsules Accelerate Digital Transformation

Is outdated technology holding back your digital transformation efforts? You’ve probably heard that integration solutions can help modernize legacy architecture, but which one is right for you, and how can you minimize integration costs and disruptions to your operations? In this post, we’ll explore reusable integration capsules and how Digibee uses them to make integration simple and efficient.

Many organizations are moving toward IT system integration as a way to modernize their enterprise, accelerate digital transformation, improve business processes and achieve better results from their digital transformation strategy.

Why In-Demand Tech Jobs Will Still Be Hard to Fill in 2023

The “Great resignation” is over, and with it some of the hiring challenges seen in the past years. Moving away from the pandemic lockdowns and into global economic unrest, what jobs continue to be hot in a cooling market?

If recessions are upon us, will we soon see the historical high unemployment seen in past recessions, and therefore a swift change in favor of employers who had previously struggled to source talent? Not quite. Forrester predicts that 80% of companies will pivot their innovation efforts to prioritize resilience, meaning that while some roles may now be less competitive, or even at risk, the roles that most closely align with the goals of resilience will stay as in-demand tech jobs in 2023.

Retail Digital Transformation in 2023: Loud and in the Cloud

The cloud, combined with digital technologies, has reinvented how retailers connect with and serve their customers. Once the domain of megastores and e-commerce platforms with the budget and resources to support on-premises infrastructure, today the cloud is unlocking digital customer experiences for retailers of all shapes and sizes. 

And merchants are loving it, able to create personalized and curated experiences across multiple channels while driving up conversion rates and average order value (AOV). But it wasn’t always like this.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

How Will Composable Enterprise Architecture Help Organizations Win?

If we’ve learned anything over the past few years, adapting quickly to change is essential to the survival of the business. The foundation upon which we build our critical IT infrastructure must be capable of moving quickly, efficiently, and securely for the company to survive.

Field CTO Tam Ayers, shares his prediction for the next years.

Composable architecture provides us with the flexibility we need to weather the storms (known and unknown) that lie ahead. Instead of resisting change and investing to stabilize the status quo, composability allows us to embrace change so we can grow and even thrive despite whatever the world throws at us.

Some enterprises are well on their way, with composable architecture an established standard. Others are just beginning their journey. Where does your organization stand?

The Upsides of Composability

In the article Digibee’s Top 3 Tech Predictions for 2023, I zeroed in on the important role composable infrastructure will play in helping businesses manage short and long-term change. 

I believe it will be a critical business differentiator in the year ahead, helping to insulate companies from unexpected economic downturns, global conflicts, pandemics, energy crises, and other disruptions.

“In turbulent times, composable business principles help organizations master the accelerated change that is essential for business resilience and growth. Without it, modern organizations risk losing their market momentum and customer loyalty.”

David Groombridge,
Research Vice President, Gartner

Those organizations that leverage a composable or microservices architecture are destined to win. In fact, analysts at Gartner predicted that companies leveraging composability will have outpaced their competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation alone. 

Additional advantages include:

1. Resilience in the face of change

Even with edge technologies and the most precise AI algorithms, accurately determining what lies ahead will never be an exact science. While it remains a business imperative to analyze and predict, we must also be prepared to quickly pivot when unanticipated change occurs. 

With composability, the company leverages a modular IT model, one that allows it to easily replace individual components with technology better suited to address whatever is happening in the market.

Those companies that rely on a monolithic architecture–one where components are tightly coupled–are unable to engineer change without impacting the entire ecosystem. With such a rigid model, it is extremely difficult to respond to disruptions in the moment.

For example, due to global supply chain issues, a retailer must continually adjust its ecommerce store to reflect fluctuating inventory levels. If the retailer is unable to make these changes in real-time, the customer experience erodes and the business ultimately fails.

2. Freedom to explore and grow

Composable infrastructure is liberating, allowing organizations to experiment with new innovations to find the perfect fit. And the experts agree, with Gartner predicting that 20% of Global 2000 CEOs will report an increased appetite for risk and improved resilience, attributed to modular business redesign. 

No longer shackled to monolithic technology stacks, the business becomes agile, challenging entrenched beliefs and exploring a range of scenarios that best serve the company. Instead of investing significant resources to simply keep the lights on, IT and Development teams are freed up to focus on innovation and the future.

The business is no longer limited by technology. Instead, it is empowered to explore its potential and chart its future, regardless of what it may hold.

3. Lower cost with higher returns

Composability lessens our reliance on a subset of technicians and developers with the broad experience required to manage a monolithic ecosystem. This depth of knowledge will no longer bottleneck how we resource for change. Instead, everyone will innovate, allowing us to tap less experienced (and less expensive) resources to do the work. 

As a result, IT will become more centralized. Greater responsibility will rest within the lines of business where technicians and developers will be hired and dedicated to focus on specific business requirements for the business unit.

While IT spend is predicted to increase, the investment will focus on increasing efficiencies, streamlining processes, and greater employee productivity. Composability supports these outcomes, embedding digital capabilities throughout the business.

The Role of Digibee’s iPaaS in Achieving a Composable Architecture

Digibee customers rely on our low-code iPaaS to support their composable architecture, helping connect modern systems with outdated and contemporary technologies. Our platform includes reusable components such as Digibee capsules for additional efficiencies, significantly reducing the time needed to develop and deploy new integrations to accelerate innovation.

If you’re interested in how Digibee can help your organization evolve to a modular IT environment, we’d be happy to show you how. Book your choice of a 15-minute Discovery Call, 30-minute custom demo, or a 60-minute deep dive to learn more.