Legacy code is everywhere. Conservative estimates put the current COBOL code base at 300 billion lines of code and Java is perhaps double that amount. Whatever programming language used today is the legacy code of the future.
Thousands of businesses still run their core systems built on old code, but legacy systems don’t age well. Over time, business logic gets written and updated again and again until it becomes brittle. Business logic defining how policies and regulations are executed becomes dispersed across the code base. And ultimately, IT and the business lose a clear understanding of what’s in the code and how it functions.
Refactoring legacy applications is time consuming and expensive, but continuing to run legacy applications with limited insight to its logic creates its own set of risks and can slow down transformation initiatives.
CIOs need a way to manage business logic contained in mission critical legacy systems and avoid the time and expense necessary to refactor code through a major technology transformation. And when modernization is unavoidable, CIOs need a fast path to legacy system transformation.
Sapiens Decision has announced its Automated Logic Extraction (ALE) solution to meet the challenges of managing legacy business logic and streamlining technology transformation. The new solution, based on innovative AI capabilities supported by a professional services delivery engagement, extracts business logic from legacy systems into decision models to reduce legacy system transformation costs.
ALE enables CIOs and their business partners to easily understand logic, written in any code, contained in legacy enterprise systems, applications, and rule engines. Business logic is extracted at scale, without disruption, reduced performance, or loss in functionality. The ability to understand and manage business logic is essential in meeting today’s organizational goals, whether it’s “transform the business” or “run the business”.
Extracting business logic into decision models enables that logic to be managed independently of technology and reused broadly throughout the enterprise. Decision models created by ALE give IT and Business a shared understanding of business logic. IT becomes more responsive to requirements of the Business when both partners have greater visibility and accessibility to business logic that use highly visual models and no code tools.
Initial customer deployments in the Banking and Insurance industries have demonstrated operational and transformation benefits with significant costs savings, up to 50% of total project costs. ALE creates another on-ramp to decision management, enabling businesses to accelerate time to market, gain efficiencies and transform their operations.
Benefits of the new Automated Logic Extraction (ALE) solution include:
- Delivering legacy code conversion at scale through AI capabilities and services with no loss in functionality. Functionality is tested to ensure converted code produces the same results as legacy code.
- Converting the logic into technology independent models providing a long-term solution. Technical debt is eliminated moving forward.
- Extracting the complete business logic from legacy assets such as code and other structured sources, including a wide range of coding languages, business rule languages, spreadsheets, and logic buried in RPA code.
- Business logic in the code is transformed into standard decision model format, managed in the Sapiens Decision Manager (DM). Business friendly terms are used throughout decision models that map directly to prior legacy naming conventions and/or technical data structures.
- The ability to review, assess, document, and optimize the extracted business logic.
- Deploying the resulting Decision models into an API enabled environment as Decision-as-a-Service (DaaS), or exported into code, such as Java (or potentially other languages), making migration to a new system seamless.