OpenLegacy
The API Integration Specialist

Romi Stein, CEO & Co-Founder

Living in an API economy and with Forrester predicting the annual spending on API management solutions by U.S. companies alone to rise from $140 Mn in 2014 to $660 Mn in 2020, CIOs today believe in maintaining APIs and API strategies at the top of their priorities. While new and emerging applications and technologies are likely to support APIs, the challenge lies with existing and legacy applications. Also, in order to truly innovate, enterprises are striving to provide digital services, accessing their core applications which is challenging in terms of time-to-value, complexity, and risk. OpenLegacy is enabling clients to overcome this hurdle by providing a unique API integration platform with automation and flexibility that reduces time-to-value and risk dramatically while providing standardization—an ideal ecosystem for digital transformation projects. The company uses API technology to extend back-end applications and data, reducing reliance on traditional closed-source Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) and legacy modernization solutions. OpenLegacy enables the enterprise to build on the value of on-premise systems rather than replacing them.

Once OpenLegacy is onboard, its standard tools extract the services and information from within client’s legacy systems into an open standard format that puts the power of integration into the hands of enterprises without the expensive handcuffs of vendor lock in. When the business process is exposed, as an API, it can then be used in new mobile, web, and cloud solutions.

We keep one leg in the deepest, most proprietary legacy applications and the other in the cutting edge of latest technologies

Scoring High on API Integration

Being a basketball fan and an active player, Stein understands that to achieve goals, one has to always keep the eye on the ball and not get distracted. So while focusing on innovating in the future, it is paramount for companies to realize that accomplishing novelty depends on the success of their existing products and offerings. “We help companies refocus on their existing core assets and products, and turn them into digital offerings to remain relevant in the future,” says Stein. For instance, a major bank, which processes over 40 percent of total transactions in its country, was collaborating with numerous vendors over the years to open up their legacy applications and making them available for the rest of the bank’s IT environment. All the attempts achieved little success until the bank approached OpenLegacy. Once onboard, OpenLegacy enabled the bank to create APIs in hours, compared to months of development per API with previous vendors. With the API building blocks in place, the bank’s business units are now accelerating the introduction of new consumer services and products.

OpenLegacy’s API platform supports both generation of internal APIs from any backend system as well as a ‘contract first’ approach of starting from designing the external APIs and connecting with the internal APIs to the enterprise core backend applications. This is in line with the current trends like the concept of internal versus external APIs and microservices. While internal APIs are built from the bottom up allowing access to existing backend systems and exposing their complexity and siloed nature as standard interfaces, external APIs are built from the internal ones. By adding orchestrations, validation and additional logic, external APIs expose high-level business processes and well defined services to the end-consumers. Microservices, on the other hand, are a pattern of vertical development and deployment where small teams can be assigned responsibilities over specific services from start to finish. This allows agile and fast development, and quick reaction to market needs. OpenLegacy’s distributed architecture also supports complex atomic transactions. In today’s complex hybrid environments of on premise legacy and cloud, this flexibility is needed for solutions that need to combine both legacy and cloud applications.

Adjudged as the ‘Cool Vendor in Integration’ by Gartner, OpenLegacy further distinguishes itself by offering an architecture that transforms integration challenges into code solutions. The company’s fresh approach to play against already established offerings is based on the grounds that, while testing integration is complex, testing code is standard and easy. And so is the case with versioning integration against versioning code. The company’s key benefits include fast time-to-execution, simplicity, and risk-reduction. This approach has won OpenLegacy a diverse client base across industries. One such example is a credit card provider with close to a third of the country’s population using one of their cards. The client has long offered a consumer-facing website, allowing its cardholders to view transaction and account details, and perform account maintenance operations. However, the company recently decided to re-build its website, which connected to the backend IBM mainframe applications. The team was looking for a more open alternative, with less reliance on IBM, as well as improved performance and better usability. OpenLegacy helped the client by replacing the previous solution, lowering the total cost of ownership by 75 percent and reducing dependency on existing vendors.

Driven by the success customers are experiencing, OpenLegacy has been continuously expanding its platform capabilities and services, including Phased Cloud Migration—a process comprising four different steps, each offering unique value to clients to seamlessly migrate to the cloud. The steps create a cloud-based internal API layer for accessing legacy assets from anywhere; add orchestrations, validations and microservices in the cloud, based on the internal APIs to create external APIs; enhance functionality with new business logic leveraging existing APIs; and eventually move the core application, which is decoupled, from the new logic to the cloud.

"We help companies refocus on their existing core assets and products and help turn them into digital offerings so that their great organization will remain relevant in the future"

“OpenLegacy is the product of countless development hours and decades of integration experience," says Stein. With API economy becoming the enabler for turning a business or organization into a platform, OpenLegacy sees great demand for its solutions across industries. Stein points out the financial services market opening myriad opportunities for players in API space as it is undergoing the perfect storm of digital banking and API. While churning innovation in the space, the company is planning to geographically expand into the far East over the years. Working hand-in-hand with regional and global system integrators, OpenLegacy is striving to ensure its customers can execute in their digital transformation strategies with solutions that can act now, transforming the traditional integration project from months to days.