Enter the next phase of Industry 4.0 with edge AI

The business world is changing at a rapid pace. Less than 10% of the FTSE 500 companies that existed fifty years ago are still around today and less than half of the companies founded since 2000 are still operating.

Company executives are well aware that their businesses need to adapt to keep up with the rapid transformation now taking place.

Two things play an essential role in a firm’s ability to adapt successfully: its data and its applications.

If these don’t have a modern foundation, then the whole transformation project will be doomed to failure.

That’s why the issue is so important today. What companies need to do in order to cope with future challenges is adapt quickly: slim down and become more agile, be more innovative, become more cost-effective, yet be secure in IT terms.

Which is why modernising applications is so important, especially for traditional businesses – they need to keep pace with the challenges facing trade and commerce nowadays.

The matter is particularly pressing in view of the stiff competition from tech-savvy companies working in the cloud as it is much easier for them to be creative and agile.

What is also important is saving the “intellectual legacy” of the more mobile but aging workforce and drawing on it in the new era.

All kinds of things can be automated

The question is, how should businesses go about modernising their own applications effectively? Generally speaking, a healthy application and data architecture is at the heart of successful modernisation. This requires understanding the current state of an organisation’s applications and data by conducting a thorough baseline analysis.

Aligning modernisation with the firm’s business results and corporate vision is another key factor. The prioritisation and implementation of steps have to be adapted accordingly in order to achieve specific business objectives.

A high-street bank in the UK shows just how necessary it is to tackle the challenges that modernisation poses systematically. Only three employees were left to maintain the IT system and run the company’s core processes at the time.

They were no longer able to meet customers’ needs, and as a result, customer service at the bank suffered and its ranking dropped dramatically – a case where it would not have been enough to move the bank’s applications into the cloud. Stabilisation and extensive modernisation were called for to boost its business results.

AI can accelerate processes

What exactly is stopping companies from taking this kind of action, then (apart from the potential costs involved)? The thing that makes modernising applications so difficult is the complexity of the heterogeneous systems that companies have developed over the years.

On top of that, there is a shortage of skilled workers capable of dealing with this degree of complexity.

The good news is that these days, modernising applications is a discipline that draws on a wealth of experience, and much of it can now be harnessed automatically.

For example, IBM has developed hundreds of tools and approaches (or “journeys”) over the last 25 years which facilitate the modernisation process in organisations and meet a broad range of requirements.

These have all been grouped together now on a platform known as the IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator. This can provide users with specific execution and transformation steps that accelerate the modernisation process rapidly – by around forty per cent in terms of planning alone.

AI is another technology IBM employs that helps speed up the process – and fits into the existing framework as well. Take IBM Watson Code Assistant for Z, for example. Among other things, this AI-based solution helps developers change from COBOL to Java code quickly and efficiently.

This makes their work easier and reduces new applications’ time-to-market. IBM Watson Code Assistant for Z is the first of a series of AI technologies that can help accelerate the modernisation process in the future.

Partnerships and co-creation

Business partnerships are another factor in accelerating application modernisation.

After all, in many cases, modernisation is about creating the perfect interplay between secure core systems on a company’s premises with the capabilities that hyperscalers possess in the hybrid cloud.

IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have partnered up to make this easier. Both companies offer a wide range of joint services, spanning from the migration and modernisation of applications and databases to overhauling the apps available, developing modern applications, and DevOps on AWS.

This benefits customers in several ways: the partnership between the two tech giants means considerable industrial know-how and technical capabilities can be combined to get their modernization on track strategically – and quickly.

“Collaboration” is the key word when it comes to getting started in application modernisation. IBM’s garage method has proven its worth here, for example. Jointly developed by IBM consultants and their customers with the help of design thinking, pilot projects, use cases and standards are created in order to begin the modernisation process.

Combined with using templates and architectural guidelines, this collaborative approach can be followed successfully through the whole modernisation process.

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