OpenLegacy, a provider of a platform through which application programming interfaces (APIs) are layered on top of legacy application processes, announced today an alliance with Boomi, an arm of Dell Technologies that provides organizations with access to an integration platform-as-service (iPaaS) that is made available as a cloud service.
Zeev Avidan, chief product officer for OpenLegacy, said the company’s core platform enables IT teams to convert legacy application processes into microservices that can be involved by tools such as Boomi using an API. Rather than merely providing access to an application, OpenLegacy is designed to capture all the business logic, metadata and associated middleware associated with a specific business process executing on, for example, an IMS or AS/400 platform, he said.
The Boomi alliance extends that capability to include processes created by either citizen integrators or developers via the Boomi cloud service. That’s critical because most mission-critical applications in the enterprise still run on legacy platforms. Rather than having to rewrite those applications from scratch, Avidan said OpenLegacy makes those applications more easily accessible to other applications and platforms via a software development kit (SDK) based on Java.
At a time when many organizations are looking to accelerate digital business transformation initiatives, Avidan said being able to programmatically invoke an entire business process accelerates the rate at which those initiatives can be completed because business processes don’t necessarily have to be re-engineered.
In the case of Boomi, that capability is now being extended all the way to end users to make it feasible to tap into existing business processes using a set of tools that already have been adopted by more than 11,000 organizations.
OpenLegacy is making a case for DevOps teams to think in terms of legacy business processes rather than individual applications. Historically, many organizations have relied on enterprise service bus (ESB) platforms to integrate applications. However, a DevOps team still has to manually integrate all the software components that make up a business process once application environments are connected.
Legacy platform integration in the absence of OpenLegacy becomes the digital equivalent of an archaeological dig, said Avidan, noting many organizations wind up hiring expensive systems integrators to accomplish the task.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is clearly a lot more interest in modernizing business processes. Many employees are working from home for the foreseeable future. Cloud services such as Boomi provide a means of enabling end users to craft workflows on their own. The challenge has always been finding a way to easily connect those workflows to transaction processing systems and other systems of record around which the business depends.
It’s not clear to what degree providing that level of access will drive a burst of business process innovation. However, DevOps teams that spend an inordinate amount of their time integrating new applications with legacy business processes might be keen to leverage an approach the promises to turn those business processes into a reusable microservice.
