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LESSONS FROM THE TRENCHES : USING GENAI FOR LEGACY APP MODERNIZATION
Eamonn O ’ Neill , Co-founder and CTO , Lemongrass , on the value of adopting a Clean Core approach to legacy apps .
There is plenty of talk these days about how gen AI tools can accelerate IT innovation through capabilities like automated code generation . At the same time , there ' s a fair amount of concern over the extent to which businesses can safely entrust important work , such as coding , to AI tools .
My company , Lemongrass , specializes in helping businesses modernize legacy IT estates and moving legacy applications to the cloud .
At present , a key goal of many companies that rely on legacy apps based on the SAP platform is to take advantage of SAP ’ s Clean Core approach .
I ' m here to tell you , based on my experiences helping businesses refactor legacy application codebases using gen AI , that AI can be an enabler of massive change in the realm of IT . The caveat , though , is that creating value using AI tools can be hard work . It requires much more than simply asking ChatGPT or Copilot to spit out some code .
To prove the point , allow me to explain how my team is using gen AI to refactor tens of thousands of lines of legacy application code – and what we ' re learning in the process .
Clean Core entails extricating custom code from applications so that it runs as extensions , rather than as a core part of the SAP platform .
This is important because historically , it was a common practice for companies to customize their SAP applications by inserting their own code into them . This made it easy to add special features to the apps . But it also complicated application maintenance and platform upgrades because teams had to ensure that their custom business logic remained compatible with newer versions of SAP ' s products – a process that
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