Wipro And IBM: Accelerating Enterprise Modernization For The AI Era
Driven by advances in cloud computing, applications have become an essential cornerstone of modern businesses. As application portfolios grow more diverse across legacy and modern technologies, managing technical debt, minimizing business disruption risk and maintaining speed in deploying or developing new applications has become a bigger challenge. Tackling legacy tech is an enterprise imperative.
Application modernization is the process of updating legacy software, so it is a better fit for modern computing approaches, including cloud environments. But it is about more than lifting and shifting to the cloud, as modernization allows organizations to experiment, iterate, and launch new capabilities faster, enabling greater agility, efficiency and innovation.
Working with IBM and Wipro helps organizations transform their application strategy to enhance operational efficiency and productivity by rearchitecting or re-platforming applications to take advantage of technologies such as microservices, APIs and containerization.
For example, the two organizations have collaborated to offer a suite of solutions to help clients address technical debt, modernize, and scale across their Java estate. This joint approach utilizes IBM’s automation tools, modern runtimes and managed cloud application service, while Wipro delivers consulting expertise, cost-effective implementation and in-depth knowledge of modernization.
IBM and Wipro have also collaborated on in-place mainframe modernization, combining IBM’s best-in-class technology and Wipro’s own advanced GenAI tools to move away from legacy technology and add flexibility, agility, and greater cost-efficiency to clients’ IT operations.
The Role of GenAI
Even with a strong business case, modernization projects such as these can be a lengthy and labor-intensive process, especially for organizations with complex application landscapes. This is where generative AI (GenAI) comes in.
From automating code conversion and test generation to enhancing developer productivity through intelligent assistants, GenAI shortens modernization timelines from months to weeks, as well as taking on manual processes and freeing up developers for other tasks.
GenAI also helps organizations tackling tech stack complexity. GenAI can analyze application dependencies (e.g. databases), map modernization priorities, pathways, and simulate outcomes, enabling a more strategic, data-driven approach.
IBM and Wipro use GenAI-powered solutions in areas like predictive maintenance, application modernization, fraud detection, and customer churn analysis, compressing timelines, minimizing manual effort, and mitigating risks.
Wipro recently worked with a large US health insurance provider to migrate its mainframe-based claims processing app to cloud native architecture. Wipro’s GenAI tools were used to automate logic extraction from the legacy mainframe code and create a knowledge portal to allow different teams within the organization to understand the application logic and behavior to create high-quality target code. Leveraging GenAI meant that the portal was generated in a far shorter timeframe than manual analysis.
The Case for Modernization
However, the cost and time involved in modernization can make creating a value proposition and getting buy-in from decision-makers a challenge. Application modernization may be seen as an IT imperative rather than a driver of growth across the business as a whole, supporting outcomes such as enhancing customer experience, quicker partner onboarding, faster time-to-market for products, and future-proofed operations.
From advisory services to implementation to managed run, partners such as IBM and Wipro bring a level of expertise organizations may lack internally, particularly around GenAI. They help ensure modernization is not seen as a one-time event but instead generates long-term value.
These partners help organizations create a strong use case for application modernization, demonstrating how it will remove barriers to growth and take advantage of microservices, APIs, containerization, and CI/CD pipelines.
Furthermore, Wipro uses GenAI to address clients’ key modernization challenges such as legacy code comprehension, talent shortages, and the need for greater development speed.