Many enterprises are going through exacting times. Some of the largest companies in the banking, travel and public sector continue to run their systems on legacy solutions. Most of the Global Distribution Systems and many banks continue to run their core core platforms built in the 1960s and 70s. Things have worked out ok so far. So long as it is not broken and there is talent to handle the platforms, why change? To this day, reams of data and complex computations on financial transactions continue on the likes of VMS, AS/400 and Unix.
XML based web services, middleware applications such as IBM’s MQ series , and portal frameworks provided a bridge between the legacy systems and the current browser based applications. In many ways, some of these enterprises have been able to hold on to the legacy systems within a heritage layer and provide added functionalities to users using java and .Net frameworks.
Things are rapidly changing . Virtual machines have already broken out the hardware obstacles of switching costs. The IoT world is rapidly emerging to become another tipping point on user experience and more importantly user’s expectations. As technology pervades our everyday life, we are going to see unthinkable integrations between our financial accounts, our retail preferences, our hobbies, personal security, and our social networks. There will be convergence between our health and travel. Personalisation will reach levels that are several times beyond what we understand today.
To a large extent, the Internet of Things is also about Big Data. The amount of data required to be handled has risen several fold. Every pulse of ours will provide deep data that will create human profiles far richer than what we know today. Systems continue to learn from the data they receive on us. Heritage systems can groan in this milieu. The complexity, depth, and sophistication expected out of the new age systems will overwhelm heritage systems.
New age companies easily side-step the baggages that come from long legacies. GoBank for example is one that runs on an App. It does not have a single branch! Needless to say, GoBank is better positioned to converge on the multitude of possibilities IoTs provide. It’s high time for Enterprises to sit-up and listen to the oncoming thump of the new age. The sounds are not faint any longer. We may be sitting on the cusp of a huge transformation. One where legacy systems may be relegated to the sagely pages of history books.