Why Rules-Driven BPM Suites Make Strategic Sense for Legacy Transformation

IT organizations are spending an alarming amount of their budgets on legacy maintenance. In some sectors as high as 80% – especially where companies have grown through acquisition and have multiple and redundant infrastructures. The cost and risk?

IT organizations are spending an alarming amount of their budgets on legacy maintenance. In some sectors as high as 80% – especially where companies have grown through acquisition and have multiple and redundant infrastructures. The cost and risk?

• Compliance liability nightmares
• Failure to deliver new business functionality—frustrated business users
• Unable to move to new architecture impairing self-service portals and competitive positioning
• Inability to safely outsource
• Staff burnout maintaining multiple redundant applications
• Increased risk of vendor lock-in

In this round table we will address these well-known issues surrounding legacy transformation, and review the merits and advantages of the build, buy and band-aid approaches to overcoming this challenge: 

• Band-aid (lift and shift) – outsource the maintenance burden  
• Build (re-platform) – use EAI toolkits and ESBs
• Buy (rip and replace)-port, wrap, or rewrite legacy applications

While none of these approaches are inherently wrong, they hold specific risks and issues but none of them address the acute driver of an increased velocity and volume of change requests from the business and the process issues associated with them. For that reason, many organizations are looking to advanced rule-driven BPM Suites that leverage SOA (service oriented architecture) as a tool to combine the best of all these approaches and handle unplanned business change.

Ken Vollmer, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Group Ken Vollmer is a principal analyst in Forrester's Application Development & Infrastructure research group, covering trends, issues, and strategies related to all forms of integration, including business process management (BPM), enterprise application integration (EAI), B2B integration (B2Bi), and electronic data interchange (EDI).

Ken has assisted hundreds of clients in North America and Europe with their integration projects, drawing upon his knowledge of emerging trends and many years of practical experience in implementing a wide range of business solutions.

Ken came to Forrester through its acquisition of Giga Information Group and has 20 years of management-level experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining Giga, he was the director of information systems planning for a large retail company, where he implemented a comprehensive EDI program with more than 1,000 trading partners. He has held a wide range of IT management positions at Carrier Corporation and MONY Financial Services, as well as various positions in the logistics arena at John Deere and Carrier.

Ken earned a B.S. in management information systems from the State University of New York and an M.S. in information resource management from the School of Information Science and Technology at Syracuse University.

Russell Keziere, BPM Markets, PegasystemsRussell Keziere is a VP of Business Process Management at Pegasystems. He has worked as a consultant, analyst, and writer and has worked in and commented on the software industry since 1983.