Brainwave Podcast: Zeev Avidan, OpenLegacy – Cloud-Native Poster Series

• Listen to the podcast on your favorite player here: https://anchor.fm/intellyx/episodes/Zeev-Avidan–OpenLegacy—Intellyx-Brainwave-Cloud-Native-Poster-Series-July-2020-ehe243 

• Watch the video version on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/8h9-L4AKOi4

About Zeev Avidan:

As Chief Product Officer and Head of Marketing, Zeev defines the roadmap of OpenLegacy’s Microservice-based API Integration & Management Software, aligns software features to the market and brings the software to the market. Zeev ensures that OpenLegacy product delivers the right features to meet customers’ growing needs. During his more than 15 years of experience, Zeev has held leadership positions, delivering information technology solutions within enterprise IT departments and in companies that provide consulting services– most recently at the leading credit card company Isracard and Hilan Tech. He also served as a senior consultant in the Israel Defense Force, dealing with advanced computing systems.

About OpenLegacy

OpenLegacy’s Digital-Driven Integration enables organizations with legacy systems to release new digital services faster and more efficiently than ever before. It connects directly to even the most complex legacy systems, bypassing the need for extra layers of technology. It then automatically generates APIs in minutes, rapidly integrating those assets into new and exciting innovations. Finally, it deploys them as standard microservices or serverless functions, giving organizations speed and flexibility while drastically cutting costs and resources. With OpenLegacy, industry-leading companies release new apps, features, and updates in days instead of months, enabling them to truly become digital to the core. Learn why leading companies choose OpenLegacy at www.openlegacy.com, and follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

• Visit OpenLegacy: https://openlegacy.com
• Get your own copy of the PDF of this poster now: https://intellyx.com/cncposter
• Listen/download the Podcast on your favorite channel or player here: https://anchor.fm/intellyx/episodes/Zeev-Avidan–OpenLegacy—Intellyx-Brainwave-Cloud-Native-Poster-Series-July-2020-ehe243 
• Watch the YouTube version here (video interview): https://youtu.be/8h9-L4AKOi4 

Transcript of the podcast:

Jason English: Well, welcome to the next edition of our, Cloud-Native, Braincast poster series. we’re featuring some of the participants in our upcoming Cloud-Native poster, which should be a very popular download among, interested parties, developers, architects, anybody interested in exploring all of the different technologies that are happening in this space.

I’m joined today by Zeev Avidan, the CPO of OpenLegacy, one of the proud Gold sponsors of this poster. So, glad you could join us Zeev.

Zeev Avidan: Happy to be here.

Jason English: Yeah. I’m glad we could have you on board for this. so just as an introduction, what does OpenLegacy do?

Zeev Avidan: Sure. So, OpenLegacy, we’re a platform, for automatically generating digital services from legacy systems.

So that’s a bit of a mouthful, but basically we make the process of creating APIs for complex legacy systems like mainframes, AS400s, SAP on prem, all kinds of different backends, easy, simple, and very, very fast.

Jason English: So, I mean, it sounds like you’re very well embedded into this landscape.

So how do you fit into the Cloud-Native vendor landscape right now?

Zeev Avidan: So when you talk about Cloud-Native, it’s both the place, the cloud, but also the technologies being used. So Cloud-Native technologies are very important, even if it’s just the first step and you’re running things on prem, but then you know you first want to move them to a private or public cloud.

It’s really important to move to those types of technologies, doing your kind of digital transformation. And sometimes that’s not an easy thing to do. If you have heavy legacy systems that run your core applications and data — what we do is we actually enable you to leverage those legacy assets as if they were digital assets.

So you can run them natively in cloud technologies and then eventually, or immediately run them as actual cloud services. on private or public clouds or even functioned clouds (Serverless). If that’s what you want to do.

Jason English: Yeah. And I think a lot of people they might consider when they think Cloud-Native, they think of things that are born on the cloud when actually it’s the opposite, right?

Cloud-Native is really more of a paradigm for how you deliver services and run the workloads wherever they’re most suited. So it seems maybe there’s some misunderstanding about that, but you know, in our research, we’ve found that the number one, most important thing about Cloud-Native as a practice is that you’re incorporating your legacy technologies into the new functionality that you’re building.

So, where do you encounter some of that thinking in your own experience in the field?

Zeev Avidan: Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, you can’t have it that moving to the cloud means everything has to be net new. Right? I mean, that’s just not working when more than 80% of code running is in legacy systems and legacy can be defined as many different things.

I once heard the definition of legacy saying that, “everything that’s already in production is already legacy.” That might be a little bit too bold, but, definitely there’s a lot there. And, for existing organizations, for incumbents in the market, they need the path forward.

They want to enjoy all the benefits of those new technologies and the latest and greatest, and they can’t just rewrite everything. So, and in a lot of cases, even if they have really deep kinds of legacy systems, mainframes and such migrating away from them is not really an option because of cost, because of risk.

So you have to find a way to do better than we used to in terms of incorporating them into your digital strategies. And basically that’s what we’re about. That’s what digital-driven integration is about. Really incorporating those legacy assets into a modern digital strategy, both in terms of the technology side of it, but also very importantly, in terms of the processes, people, team culture, all of those teams kind come, come into play.

Jason English: Yeah, definitely. What technologies would you say are upstream or downstream from OpenLegacy in your current, product suite?

Zeev Avidan: Obviously, we’re connecting with legacy systems. So on that side, I mean, basically whatever’s complex and old. But you know, when using the platform, basically we’re able to deploy to a lot of different types of running environments.

So, Kubernetes, different clouds and more than just the big three, of course, containerization technologies, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Docker… And, so all of those different things that wrap-contain-ship code, they’re all downstream from us, basically.

Jason English: Yeah. It sounds like an important part of that strategy, providing an option like that, and it seems like, you know, one of the biggest challenges your customers might face is that they’re, it’s not only a technology chasm to jump over, but there’s a large skillset chasm, right? I mean, it seems like  a big part of the problem might be around, do you still have the people on to translate legacy systems as well as the newer skills to translate them into a modernized form?

Are you seeing that in your daily work there?

Zeev Avidan: Absolutely it’s a skills gap, but also it’s a mindset gap. So in terms of the skills, I mean, these are different skills. COBOL skills are different than, you know, Java or JavaScript skills, but also mindsets are extremely different because going from something that’s very centralized, where I have teams for different types of, layers of technology to cross-functional teams, to thinking about kind of distributing not just the software, but distributing the responsibilities of who owns the API?

That’s a big question. You know, does the application own the API, or does the integration team own the API? These are a lot of questions that go both to the skills, because if there’s specific skills needed, then probably those people will own that.

But if you democratize the skills, then you also have to democratize the responsibility. So these are really interesting topics that our customers are struggling with.

Jason English: Hmm. do you have an interesting customer challenge that you’d like to share about how, someone has overcome some of these, issues that they’ve encountered?

Zeev Avidan: Absolutely. So we do have a customer, I won’t name them, but that they are a global 2000 bank, and they’re the largest bank in their country. And really the challenge there was around, they have a mainframe, which most banks do have, and from their mainframe to create a digital service, basically all the way from their integration stack — that used to take them six months. Now I know people might think, well, six months, that’s a crazy amount of time.

That’s what we see in the market, four to six to nine months to create a single digital service. And when you asked yourself why, if you ask different people across the chain ‘hands on keyboard, how long do you work?’ ‘

Well, you know, Maybe two days here, maybe a week there,’ but it’s not just the hands on keyboards. It’s the transition between the teams, different priorities of the different people, the, how much it takes you to iterate on stuff. So really what we call the negative space.

That’s where a lot of the time gets lost and you can’t really fix that, without dramatically reducing the number of components, teams and technologies involved.

So basically with the OpenLegacy platform, they were able to set up an entire API factory, the entire process took them around the time it takes them to do one digital service, around five months, to set up the entire API factory.

And from that point onwards, because of the automation, because of this simplification, because of the layering, now it takes them a single Java developer, not even a mainframe person, a single Java developer can develop five digital services within one sprint, which is two weeks — and basically that’s from requirements all the way to a production staging environment.

So consider, you know, the huge impact on an organization that used to spend so much time and effort on creating one service, versus basically now they’re constrained by demand rather than by their ability to execute.

That’s a game changer for them.

Jason English: Yeah, it sounds like it eliminates a lot of those constraints, especially the interdependencies among teams, and also just waiting on a lot of this work to be completed, to add each component to that cycle. So you could see how that might generate sort of a flywheel effect where, the releases start going faster after that initial time investment.

So, what is unique about your solution that lets companies do that?

Zeev Avidan: We do bring something that’s unique to the integration market, and the legacy integration market almost by definition is not a market that has seen a lot of innovation. You know, there’s not a lot of Silicon Valley companies dealing with legacy systems.

And so, really what we brought was kind of an outside thinking or at least outside of that space, kind of thinking into the problem. And really, instead of thinking about it, in terms of let’s add another layer, and another layer — I have my ESBs and I’ve been doing SOAP services and maybe Atom feeds and CORBA and whatnot, all of those different protocols throughout the years.

And now I’m just adding another layer, which is APIs. Well, you know, it works technically, but it doesn’t work in terms of the speed and it doesn’t work in terms of, it’s very brittle. Instead of that, we’re providing a completely new approach, which is saying, we know this is digital first. This is digital-driven, which is starting from how should a digital implementation look like, and we’re bringing that to the legacy.

So it’s a different type of thinking in terms of how we do things in terms of, you know, the, the actual process, but most certainly in terms of the results.

Jason English: Hmm. Well, interesting Zev, you know, so what do you see as a trend to watch over the next one or two years in this area?

Zeev Avidan: So I would say one trend that we’ve seen.

I think it’s already an established trend would be people starting to realize that Hybrid IT, not a transitional thing. It’s an end state. They will always have some kind of a Hybrid IT environment. I think that’s, that’s a mindset that people are getting more and more accustomed to.

And one emerging trend that we’re starting to see in still pretty early stages. We’re starting to see a bit of a shift towards serverless functions in the cloud type solutions. It’s still not huge in the enterprise world, but definitely people start seeing it, the benefits there, and we’re keeping a very close eye. We do have an, you know, an offering around that.

We are keeping a close eye on that trend because we believe that that’s a trend that’s gaining more, more and more traction.

Jason English: Yeah, agreed. I think there’s, I think both approaches, you know, containerization and serverless will be huge and continuing off into the future. And yeah, it really depends on the type of workload that you’re talking about.

It seems like, what we’ve seen among other customers is that it’s like having a potato chip, you know, once they have one, they just started eating the whole bag and throwing a lot of functions at that side of the house as well. So, definitely that’s worth watching.

Zeev Avidan: That’s perfect. Because you know, when you don’t know how fast you can do things, you don’t know what exactly you can do. You’re planning for small projects, but then when you’re starting to realize I do have that capacity, I do have that muscle. Then the ambition starts growing and you know, all kinds of demands.

So we always tell customers don’t plan for capacity plan for flow — don’t plan for, you know, I need 200 APIs next year. Plan for, I don’t know what I will need next year. So I need to have the process to create whatever the business side comes up with.

Jason English: Yeah. And to accept those projects, even just to be ready. But that’s a interesting take, I’d say, Zeev. Where can our listeners go to find out more information?

Zeev Avidan: So obviously our website www OpenLegacy.com, that’s you know, our main source of information —  if that’s interesting or if that’s relevant, contact us and we’ll be more than happy to engage.

Jason English: Great. All right. Well, thanks Zeev. And, it’s good having you on the show.

Zeev Avidan: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jason English: And scene.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Intellyx podcast. If you have any questions or ideas for future episodes, feel free to drop us an email at PR@Intellyx.com. Until next time, keep on transforming.

 

©2020 Intellyx LLC. All dialogue in this program represents the expressed opinions of the hosts and guests, and are not necessarily the official position of Intellyx, or any company mentioned or included in this podcast audio or video. Intellyx publishes the Cloud-Native Computing Poster, and the biweekly Cortex and BrainCandy newsletters.