How can legacy software systems be modernised? What role do mainframes, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence play in this? These were the questions addressed last week in a guest lecture by Sebastian Krach, Head of Technology at DPS, at Prof. Dr Robert Heinrich’s Chair of Software Engineering at the University of Ulm.
Under the title “COBOL, PL/1, Assembler & Co. – There is a Future in Legacy”, Sebastian Krach gave students an insight into the challenges and strategies involved in modernising legacy IT landscapes. The focus was on approaches to the further development of business-critical applications, current developments relating to mainframe platforms, and the increasing use of artificial intelligence in software engineering.
Using concrete practical examples from the financial sector, he demonstrated how established applications can be further developed step by step and why technical expertise in legacy technologies will remain in demand in the future. It became clear that modern mainframes, hybrid cloud architectures and AI-based development tools now work closely together, opening up new possibilities for the further development of existing systems.
With this guest lecture, DPS continued the dialogue between academia and industry. At the same time, it underlines the importance of legacy expertise for the digitalisation of business-critical IT landscapes – a topic that DPS also continuously addresses at the Legacy IT Center.
