Category: Blogs

We are excited to drive the adoption of S/4HANA and Cloud along with RISE for SAP and our partners.

“RISE with SAP” is a subscription offering that bundles software licenses, Infrastructure-as-a-Service from your hyperscaler of choice, Cloud Managed Services, and Application Managed Services. SAP leads with One Offer, One Contract, and Unmatched TCO as the benefits to the customer.

In our view, RISE is about SAP establishing itself in the ever-growing Cloud market and taking back control over customer adoption of the latest SAP feature sets. SAP customers who maintain their own systems usually and inevitably lag behind on updating their systems due to the high degree of complexity, especially when considering customizations.

SAP wants to change that, becoming more agile, and delivering continuous value to its customers via a Software-as-a-Service model. This is a fantastic goal for sure, but what happens to all of the custom code that has been self-written, paid for, working well, and is critical for the customer’s business operations? Quite often, some of our system integrator partners end up walking the customers down the greenfield or re-implementation path, which is sometimes a fit, but what if it isn’t? Successful transformation of any kind, including RISE with SAP, starts with proper analysis and expert level planning. smartShift strongly believes that our 20+ years of experience deep in the heart of code analysis, automated code remediation, and modernization should absolutely be a key component when considering the RISE with SAP offering.

What are the benefits of RISE with SAP for customers?

One of the main benefits of RISE is a clearer explanation of the path to S/4HANA and the cloud. The different S/4HANA editions provide customers flexibility with various extensibility concepts. Ultimately, businesses can run S/4HANA in the public cloud, and customizations can run decoupled on another instance, retaining past investments. Custom and standard code can coexist “side by side,” and communication will run via standardized (REST) interfaces.

This revolutionary approach has significant benefits for customers, allowing them to become more agile and innovate faster with a DevOps approach. This is a key competence of smartShift. We have been helping our customers to go down this path for quite some time now. We have built up an expert knowledge of the SAP Codebase, which is the backbone of our intelligent automation platform™ that we have built over the last 20 years. smartShift’s automation platform focuses on the customers’ strategic custom developments that they have implemented to differentiate from their competitors. Over the last few years, smartShift has systematically started working with our customers to identify their key business processes and prepare them for future cloud architecture.

While manual modernization approaches are very time consuming and often not feasible after all activities are known, an automated approach is highly supportive, repeatable, fast, and always delivers the same high quality. Algorithms can be used to determine which processes can be decoupled, whether they are used often, the frequency with which they are adapted, and how they fit into the new FIORI-supported architecture. Lengthy manual approaches that can take months while algorithmically done in hours! Models that visualize dependencies in graphs and identify interfaces to be generated as REST APIs allow fast, agile development. By doing so, not only is the customer code decoupled from the standard, but “services” can be generated depending on the business domain. This allows companies to reuse their existing software assets, resulting in huge cost and time savings for a migration project.

At smartShift, we are incredibly excited about the rejuvenated messaging from SAP to drive adoption for S/4HANA, cloud, and ongoing continuous modernization. We believe in the RISE for SAP program because we know that it will enhance the return on investment in both time and money spent on modernizing SAP systems. In fact, we have been successfully delivering smartSuite for SAP on Cloud by smartShift, a single-source bundled solution similar to RISE, for years! The solution has already proven successful for numerous customers, such as Nilfisk, a major supplier of professional cleaning equipment for industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. Last week, we posted a video about it that you can check out here.

What are the benefits of RISE with SAP for our system integrator partners?

In addition to our RISE-like bundle, smartShift automation for custom code modernization will fast-track RISE implementations for our partners. Leveraging our automation, SAP and its SI partners can complete transformations exponentially faster and with significantly less risk. For years, partners like DXC, Deloitte, IBM, and PWC have relied on smartShift’s automation and expertise to accelerate transformation programs for customers such as BMW, Airbus, Döhler, Procter & Gamble, and Sika, among others. smartShift’s Intelligent Automation Platform™ complements the RISE with SAP program to provide customers with:

1. Automated system analysis enabling rapid understanding of the entire custom code base accelerating planning & project delivery
2. Automated simplification of existing custom code through decommissioning of obsolete code, accelerating adoption of future releases, and simplifying upgrades to reduce cost and time significantly
3. Automated analysis to identify, repackage, containerize and transform custom code to SAP’s modern frameworks in RISE like RAP, CAP, Fiori as native SAP cloud code
4. Automated modernization of custom code to support all SAP projects, including S/4HANA, Security, Stability, M&A, and system consolidations

1. Speed: 4 weeks guaranteed
2. Quality: Error rates <0.1%
3. Issue Resolution: <2hrs

smartShift has been leading the way in providing automation to help customers realize SAP strategic initiatives on the journey to the Intelligent Enterprise via cloud adoption and S/4HANA transformation. As a global business partner to SAP, we are excited and expertly positioned to walk alongside the RISE program and help you fast track your business transformation. Stop running your SAP like you did ten years ago and evolve to RISE with SAP and Shine with smartShift. The time is now! Reach out to us for a technology-enabled data-driven analysis and planning to fast track your business transformation.

 

smartShift, known for its intelligent automation platform™ for SAP and Cloud digital transformations, announced today that the Company’s Board of Directors has appointed Derek Oats as Chief Executive Officer and Kendall Walker as Chief Financial Officer.

“At smartShift, we have developed turnkey solutions for our customers powered by our unique patented platform that automates the analysis and rewriting of software code from legacy architectures to the cloud. Derek and Kendall’s addition to the company will be a catalyst for driving results and accelerating growth, and we are thrilled to welcome them to our team,” said Vyom Gupta, Chief Operating Officer at smartShift

Derek will assume day-to-day leadership of the Company and be responsible for expanding the smartShift business globally. Derek has a successful track record of Global and American sales and leadership roles. He was recently the CEO of Americas for SNP, a leading software suite for data transformations. Prior to SNP, he was Global Vice President, Database and Data Management for SAP, the World’s Largest Provider of Enterprise Application Software.  He is naturally customer experience focused and solution minded and has held various leadership roles at top technology companies including Tata Consultancy Services, IBM, and Oracle.

“It is an honor to be named the new CEO of smartShift, a company that has a truly unique software automation platform that helps SAP customers take advantage of real S4 transformations and also migrate to the cloud.  I first became familiar smartShift back in 2014 just before I joined the SAP leadership team, within their Global Database and Technology division, on a direct referral into the company by Hasso Plattner.  I’ve kept my eye on smartShift ever since because I think it’s the best kept secret when it comes to digital transformation. Given the recent launch of the RISE WITH SAP program, I am very excited about the future at smartShift and delivering an unparalleled value to many customers,” said Derek.

Kendall is a seasoned finance expert with over twenty years of experience in investment companies, operations, legal, accounting, and finance. Previously, he served fourteen years as the CFO for a quantitative model-driven investment adviser, where he guided the firm from a start-up to a multi-billion dollar platform. He also spent several years working within this financial services audit practice of E&Y and is a CFA charter holder and a CPA.

“Companies have very complex IT environments and are more focused than ever before on reliable and seamless cloud operations. I am excited to join smartShift which has powerful technology to make such cloud transformations a reality for its clients,” said Kendall.

About smartShift
smartShift is cloud migration, technology optimization, and managed services partner to the world’s leading businesses. smartShift’s patented Intelligent Automation Platform™, reduces the risk, cost, and duration of complex IT transformations, enabling organizations to upgrade to next-generation cloud computing environments seamlessly. smartShift’s automation platform has been used in over 1,000 application modernization projects, analyzed, and converted over 2B lines of code.  smartShift has offices in the USA, Germany and India.  www.smartShift.com.

For more information, please contact:
Melissa Simon, Director of Marketing, smartShift
Phone:  630-320-9427, E-mail:  msimon@smartShift.com

Can you afford not to know and understand the benefits of migrating SAP to the cloud? 

Jeff Farney, VP of IT at SouthWest Water partnered with smartShift to help upgrade his IT infrastructure to recognize the benefits of moving to the cloud including:

• High availability, disaster recovery and robust security
• Reduction in infrastructure cost from moving to the cloud
• Better flexibility and scalability to meet business needs
• Intelligent Automation and Continuous Modernization 

To learn how watch this short (15 minutes) webinar with Jeff where he shares how Southwest Water greatly reduced the cost and risk of their ERP migration with smartShift’s all-inclusive monthly subscription service with ZERO upfront fees.

Want to learn more? Schedule a call to see if our cloud-agnostic approach to modernizing legacy SAP systems and operating them as cloud-native applications is a good fit for you and your team.

Like people, most organizations have a natural aversion to change. As such, change management for S/4 programs is critical but can be met with resistance, especially in defining standardization targets. Failure to get buy-in across the organization on standardization will most certainly lead to failure.

In a new report co-authored by PwC and smartShift, we highlight the importance of starting business transformation by evaluating the current situation leveraging process mining and custom code analysis. 

The report highlights how custom code analysis provides a unique view on usage, the potential for back-to-standard or retirement, and an assessment of the business reasons to persist with select custom coding. Additionally, custom code analysis provides valuable insight into S/4 and HANA compatibility, performance impact, and general code quality. 

These insights are derived from benchmarks developed by smartShift from hundreds of custom code analyses of large SAP installations worldwide with, on average:

• >30.000 custom objects
• >3 million normalized lines of code
• >500 Clones of SAP standard objects
• 40–60% retirement potential for unused code, based on system usage statistics

The report highlights how PwC partners with smartShift’s Intelligent Automation platform to:

• Scope, identify, and migrate technical bills of materials (TBOMs) based on business processes to be retained
• Aggressively clean up unused code and establish a secure backup/restore process
• Perform automated conversion of custom objects to HANA, S/4HANA, and modern coding standards
• Regroup, rename, and cluster components to represent specific application clusters
• Automate dual maintenance and retrofit to keep project landscapes synchronized

Download the full report for free to learn more about the critical role automated custom code analysis plays in demystifying standardization with SAP S/4HANA.

BOSTON, Oct. 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — smartShift a leading provider of automated transformations and management of legacy enterprise systems in the cloud, today announced it has attained Microsoft Gold Platform Competency for Partners. The Cloud Platform Competency is designed for partners to capitalize on the growing demand for infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS) solutions built on Microsoft Azure. As a Gold Partner, smartShift has demonstrated expertise with Microsoft technologies and a proven ability to meet customer’s needs. Microsoft Gold Partners receive a rich set of benefits, including access, training, and support, giving them a competitive advantage in the channel.

“We are pleased to have attained Gold Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program,” said Vyom Gupta, Chief Operating Officer at smartShift. “At smartShift, we have been successfully migrating and managing enterprise systems to Azure for multiple years. Our smartS4 offering backed by our patented automation is a new single-source solution to run legacy enterprise environments in the cloud. It’s a SaaS like operating model for legacy systems where we consolidate all infrastructure, technical upgrades, ongoing code and data volume management, and managed services into a single monthly fixed-fee backed by our SLA guarantees.”

“By achieving a Gold competency, partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the latest Microsoft technology,” said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “These partners have a deep expertise that puts them in the top of our partner ecosystem, and their proficiency will help customers drive innovative solutions.”

For more information on smartShift, visit: www.smartShift.com.

About smartShift

smartShift is a cloud migration and enterprise technology optimization partner to the world’s leading businesses. smartShift’s patented suite of automation tools reduce the risk, cost, and duration of complex IT transformations, enabling organizations to seamlessly upgrade to high-performance, next-generation computing environments. smartShift’s Cloud Managed Services (“CMS”), Cloud Architecture Services, and DevOps Services enable efficient management of critical on-prem and on-cloud systems.

Jason Bailey
Media Relations
jbailey@smartShift.com

By Derek Oats, EVP & GM Business Development
In the COVID-19 world, there has arguably never been more pressure on business and IT leaders to “do more with less.” These leaders are routinely challenged with prioritizing strategic initiatives with shrinking budgets and limited manual resources. The competition never stops, and the show must go on.  

With this pressure, the spotlight eventually lands directly on the ability to automate manual tasks, if at all possible. For an SAP customer, much of the focus — and rightly so — goes towards understanding custom code complexity and history. There are several driving factors to the pain associated with trying to make heads or tails out of this massive vat of spaghetti code conundrum.  

1. Nobody Keeps it Real Anymore. It is very difficult for customers to get accurate information on the costs and debt associated with SAP code remediation.

2. Does Anybody Have a Flathead Screwdriver, and Do I Actually Need It? If an SAP customer asks five trusted advisors, “Do I need tools for code remediation and which ones do I use?” they will typically get five different answers.

3. Highlighting the Problem Without Providing a Solution. There is a big difference between analyzing and understanding what needs to be remediated and actually remediating! And you do not want partial solutions but guaranteed outcomes.

4. Am I bringing a Butter Knife to a Cane Patch? Are you an SAP customer that is not aware of the significant value of automated code remediation and one that has only been presented with only a people-based manual effort approach?  

If you are looking at your roadmap to S/4HANA and wondering how you can prepare today, or if you are looking to better understand your entire SAP ecosystem and trying to strategically plan your SAP roadmap in the coming years, smartShift’s Automated Analysis and Transformation will help you along the way.

smartShift’s differentiated Intelligent Automation Platform is unique in three ways:

1. Automated system analysis enabling rapid understanding of the entire custom code base accelerating planning & project delivery

2. Automated ability to:

• Modernize custom code to support all SAP projects, including S/4HANA, M&A, and system consolidations
• Simplify existing custom code through decommissioning of obsolete code, accelerating adoption of future releases & simplifying upgrades

3. SLA-backed commitments on conversion time and quality leading to reduced risk & overall cost

• Speed – 2 to 5 weeks guaranteed code conversion delivery
• Quality – Error rates <0.1%

If you’d like to learn more about smartShift and how we can help you with automating the remediation and transformation of custom code as part of your SAP roadmap download our free guide or set up a free consultation with one of our experts today. 

By Stefan Hetges, Founder and Chairman

Are you already using a microservices architecture (MSA)? You probably are, but you don’t even know it!

For example, a Google search generates an average of about 70 microservices when you click the “Google Search” or “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons. So, it’s no surprise that today about 50% of companies claim to use microservices in one way or another.

In this blog post, I explain the reasons why MSA is of interest and the best way to use it in conjunction with your existing legacy systems. With the right approach and tools, it’s risk free to liberate critical processes from the monolith and deliver them as independently-deployable microservices. An MSA offers many advantages, not only for the development process but also for users and stakeholders.

Microservices Architecture is Not Only a Technology Decision

The decision to use microservices is not just about using new technology. To take full advantage of its benefits, you also have to embrace the development culture of DevOps. You have to consider trade-offs and increased complexity (there is no free lunch). Each microservice is implemented as an independent service, developed by a small team that deploys it independently of all other changes in the system. Smaller autonomous service teams complete their development and make deployment decisions quicker than other organizations.

The good news is that the development culture doesn’t have to change overnight. At the same pace, as you liberate business functionality from a monolithic system, you define the organizational development framework in parallel.

Understand Your Software Assets

Understanding the software assets in a legacy system takes several months or even years using traditional manual approaches. Burdening your organization’s most important resources with the task of understanding the past is wasteful. Intelligent Automation can save you time, boost efficiency and improve quality.

Successful MSA transformation planning of an existing monolith requires understanding of both business processes and their semantics. What are the dependencies to existing business processes? The frequency of calls? The usage of business functions? Where do performance problems lie? What is causing system failures? What are the data sources and interfaces?

Efficiently developing this detailed understanding is an advantage of smartShift’s Intelligent Automation. The use of algorithms and machine learning techniques dramatically reduces this normally time-consuming work.

Selecting Software Assets to Become Microservices

The following seven criteria can help you prioritize which software assets you should liberate from the monolith. If any one of these criteria hold true for a particular software asset, you will likely benefit from running the business functionality in an MSA going forward.

A High Rate of Change
Some of your business processes change frequently. They evolve at different speeds or even in a completely different direction. Our experience shows that about 10%-30% of legacy systems need to be adapted to business requirements very frequently, and the rest to a smaller extent. Relevant processes should be carved out to increase competitiveness and adaptability to market requirements.

Independent Life Cycles
Software changes – and the underlying business process changes – are typically implemented on a fixed-release schedule. Fixed-release schedules mean that innovation isn’t agile, and the chance to gain a competitive market advantage is dampened. Often, innovations either never make the leap into production or don’t get deployed as quickly as needed by the business community. Separating critical services from the core system allows you to iterate quickly and take advantage of new business opportunities. The ability to continuously implement and apply innovations enables you to gain or maintain your leading role in your market, and also to improve upon it.

Independent Scalability
Some business processes have high utilization at certain times (e.g., fiscal-year end) and must be scaled independently from the rest of the application. Seasonality, time dependency, or even demand spikes (e.g., sensors generating high data volumes for processing) are examples of this phenomenon. Autonomous microservices scale independently as the load increases, and the MSA will start multiple service instances. If you leave the modules in the monolithic framework, you have no choice but to scale the entire application, which means that your license and hardware costs must be sized for the worst-case scenario.

Isolating Failure
Your application has an external interface that calls an unreliable service. Your system reacts with a failure, e.g., when some data is not complete or when the uptime of the system does not meet your requirements. You can isolate this dependency from the rest of the system and build a failover mechanism to keep data consistent, or even cache data when the service is unavailable. The microservices architecture mitigates performance degradation due to unreliable third-party dependencies. You don’t have to rely on queuing mechanisms to slow down your system.

Fast Test Cycles
This is the best news of all for companies where long test cycles inhibit innovation. Not only will a small-scale, autonomous microservice be tested much faster, but you’ll also be amazed at how much automation is possible during deployment and testing. The immediate advantage is that unit, integration, and regression tests can be run multiple times per day. Microservices are maintained in distinct repositories, keeping them simple and easing testing. Instead of engaging hordes of business users for testing, you only need a few resources. With a fine-grained MSA approach, problems are isolated and therefore easy to identify, fix and test.

Simplification of Interaction
In a world of highly networked consumers and services, you want the flexibility to exchange one service provider with another or add other providers to ensure you’re never under supplied. With an abstraction layer, you can protect your system from external dependencies that change frequently. A technical layer hides the complexity of the dependency, making migration easier in the future.

Choice of Technology
In a monolith, you have limited options to change the technology stack. The technology stack and the pace of technology adoption is dictated by the supplier/manufacturer. It is even more difficult if your system is old and the original team who built it is long gone.

An MSA structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. The project is not a single application, but a set of independently deployable small services, each of which is implemented in its own language. For example, to process a large amount of data, engineers choose Python. Ruby is the right choice for an appealing graphical evaluation, and a large and stable part of the application uses Java. Technology choices also apply to databases. Use elastic search for big data analysis, or divide your enterprise data into highly available data in (for example) SAP HANA and store cold data in Hadoop to save costs while still having it available. You don’t need to choose a technology for an entire project, but instead for a specific task that best fits your needs.

What’s Next?

The MSA candidates have to be liberated from their monolithic legacy confines. smartShift Continuous Intelligent Automation is used to carve out the candidate functionality and to generate the components required to operate the business processes as a service on a new platform. Business functionality is gradually transformed into something better, cheaper, faster, and easier to maintain. In the monolith, the “dead” parts can be retired and removed. If you include new functions during the liberation process, you can make the transformation more attractive for business stakeholders and help to assure their support for your MSA implementation efforts.

Interested in learning more about how you can turn your monolith into microservices? Set up a free consultation with an expert from smartShift today!

smartShift Technologies has been awarded Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency Status, a certification that highlights our capabilities of moving enterprise workloads to the cloud. AWS is a leader in the public cloud space, and provides infrastructure as service (IaaS), platform as service (PaaS) and packaged software as service (SaaS) offerings. smartShift is proud to be an AWS Partner with multiple competencies, providing our clients with everything from initial assessments through architecture design and migration, helping them take full advantage of the cloud. By achieving AWS Migration Competency Status, smartShift has proven that it has the skills to help safely and efficiently move our customers to AWS, and that we can successfully execute all phases of complex projects.

“We are happy to add the AWS Migration Competency Status to our list of credentials. This exemplifies our ongoing 10+ year partnership commitment to AWS and our ever-expanding capabilities to bring more customers and more workloads the mutual benefits of smartShift and AWS,” said Vyom Gupta, EVP, Enterprise Cloud Solutions, smartShift Technologies. “With both our philosophies aligned around ‘customer obsession’ and ‘automation,’ we will continue to bring better, faster, and less expensive offerings to our mutual customers.”

As an AWS Advanced Partner, smartShift already holds status as an MSP Partner, Oracle Competency, and Solutions Partner. Adding the AWS Migration Competency Status confirms that smartShift is highly-capable and can expertly navigate the move to AWS. This competency status helps differentiate smartShift from the competition, and provides reassurance to customers that we have the experience and know-how to deliver a successful transition.

To achieve migration status, smartShift had to go through an in-depth audit with AWS. The audit included a rigorous review of actual customer migrations executed by smartShift. Our team had to show a level of proficiency around the completed projects, processes, and tools leveraged to make the client successful.

Our customers can rest assured that our team has a track record of proven success, and that our familiarity with AWS will not only help deliver their migration quickly and successfully, but also enable us to provide them with services and support beyond migration that will make their business more effective and efficient.

If your company is ready to work with a proven partner to migrate to AWS, contact us now to get started.

 

 

smartShift Technologies brings the power of intelligent automation to DXC Technology’s portfolio of SAP solutions and services. The partnership enables our SAP customers to gain an unparalleled, automated, end-to-end solution to safely and quickly migrate, modernize and manage SAP applications and infrastructure — a significant step toward digital transformation.

Customers embracing digital change need an innovative and agile partner that can help build and manage their digital core platform. Together, our two companies help customers migrate to S/4HANA —on premises or in a hyperscale cloud infrastructure — faster, safer and cost-effectively, without disrupting the business.

Download PDF to READ MORE

For the past 25 years, I have been working in the area of automation.  But this is not where I started my career. During my master’s program at USC, I was first introduced to artificial intelligence, a field which immediately fascinated me.  At that time, jobs related to AI were far and few between, but my first job was indeed relevant: working with rule-based decision systems. Since then, the field of artificial intelligence has progressed a lot, for the most part without grabbing headlines.  Only during the recent years it has captured wide attention once more, particularly the field of machine learning. It reminds me of the hype that web and “dot com” introduced in the 1990s. Bubble anyone? Only this time around, the advances in this field have provided a solid foundation to sustain machine learning expansion.  My second job introduced me to the world of application and language understanding, and this is where I have been active for many years. A lot of fascinating things happened during that time, and as you will see things are now headed to where I started. The cycle is now closing.

Understanding application and their code

In the beginning, there was the mainframe.  Beasts of power that could handle a tremendous number of transactions, but which came at a cost.  Next, the “network was the computer” as Sun Microsystems heralded to the world. Companies now had alternatives to the mainframe monoliths.

There was a problem, however.  Successful companies had invested a lot of money in creating mainframe processes that gave them the edge, and of course reams of custom code to go with it.  What to do with all that custom code now? The will was strong but the code was weak, proprietary and incompatible. And we should not forget that relational databases were not yet taken for granted.  Hierarchical and network database management systems were strong and, if you ask me, based on elegant concepts and very good at what they were doing. But history is (re)written by the winners, so servers and relational databases it became.

The role of automation

The word of the day was Migration.   Migration away from the mainframe monoliths to the client-server.  But that required a splitting of applications across layers in a way that would fit the client-server model:  front-end, business and database layers. This was a tall order since the challenge was multi-level:

• Front-end:  Going from green screen terminals to fancy graphical terminals with WYSIWYG capabilities (yes, WYSIWYG was a feature back then)
• Network:  State-fullness was the norm, therefore the correct handling of state was paramount
• Database: Consistent transaction handling, remaining compatible with transaction managers (not everybody wanted or was willing to switch at the same time)
• New languages:  COBOL was prevalent for business logic.  However the new server world supported additional languages, such as C, C++, and Java.
• Operating systems:  Enter Unix and its numerous flavors, Windows and X for front-end interaction.

Clearly a disciplined approach was mandatory in order to succeed.  And this is where application understanding and automation came into the picture.  Application understanding may mean different things to different people, but here we will define it as a way of extracting the key attributes and features of the application.  Extraction is done programmatically in a repeatable manner and stored in a repository as a meta-model of the application and its components. The attributes and features need to be carefully selected in a manner that enables smart decision making when it is time to “rewrite” the application. “Rewriting” actually means both refactoring and rearchitecting.  Refactoring applies to the code, rearchitecting to the application. In our case, rearchitecting was the redistribution of the application components to best match the client-server paradigm. In most cases, breaking up monoliths meant both rearchitecting and refactoring.

The object-oriented paradigm

Most of the code we had to deal with in monolithic systems was written in procedural languages or reporting languages such as COBOL.  Also common was the use of generators, mostly for code, screen definitions and database artifacts. Early refactoring was performed using C, which at the time was the lingua franca of Unix for business and database layers.  For front-end coding, to some degree C++ was the best option in order to take advantage of Windows GUI capabilities.

At the dawn of the millennium, Java gained a strong foothold among developers.  By now it has also become the “favorite” in enterprise development. Java was introduced to a wider developer audience and acted as a facilitator of some key aspects of programming:  object oriented programming, separation of concerns, virtual machines, software packaging and interoperability.

Our use of a meta-model and a repository allowed us to build infrastructure and tools that were flexible and platform neutral.  All due to our intelligent automation approach, which allowed pluggable support of source and target languages and the ability to assimilate and make best use of numerous platforms

ERP and SAP(r)

Another important trend that gained steam in the mid-1990s and has kept growing strong ever since is ERP software and platforms.  For us as a company, one particularly important ERP software was and still is SAP. Our intelligent automation approach enabled us to follow its progress over the last 10-15 years, and we will continue to do so in the future.  The earlier application of our automated solution addressed mostly code refactoring and had a strong focus on ABAP, the programming language of SAP ERP. We were and still are present to support SAP customers with our intelligent automation, particularly when SAP started its journey to digitalization with the support of in-memory databases, the launch of S/4 and the move to the cloud.

Closing words

The beginning of the new year is always a good opportunity to take stock, reflect and plan ahead. As you probably know by now, history repeats itself.  Intelligent automation means staying alert and keeping an eye out for new opportunities. As I hinted earlier, I see the cycle now closing after all these years, especially from my perspective.  I am happy to say that we are now adopting machine learning into our automation repository as a further tool to drive application understanding and open new possibilities to our tools and customers.  In that sense, I would like to wish to all of you a successful start of this New Year and of whatever new chapter you are about to open. From our side, our new year’s resolution is to publish more blogs about us, our intelligent automation approach and the technologies we are using.

Niko Faradouris, Senior Technical Architect, smartShift Technologies, Mannheim