OpenLegacy Expands Big Data Partnerships
September 16, 2020 Alex Woodie
Over the past few months, OpenLegacy has established new partnerships with a handful of tech firms patrolling the big data waters, including Talend, Collibra, and BigID. According to the legacy application modernization specialist, it’s all part of an effort to help its IBM i and mainframe customers upgrade their applications and experiences.
OpenLegacy is unique among IBM i modernization vendors in its approach. The company’s software allows customers to expose legacy applications, such as those written in RPG, via APIs and Web services.
Now the company is bringing several partners into that API-driven approach. For instance, its partnership with Talend, which it unveiled last month, is aimed at helping customers get the most out of the data stored on IBM i servers and mainframes. By hooking these midrange and mainframe digital assets into Talend’s data fabric, it helps customers leverage the data stored in these systems.
“Teaming with OpenLegacy extends the benefits of trusted, compliant and timely data to organizations that currently struggle to combine legacy data with their cloud data assets,” Rolf Heimes, the global head of business development for Talend, stated in a press release. “This combination enables organizations to achieve optimal value from all their operational and analytical data.”
Talend isn’t a stranger to the IBM i world. The company, which develops data integration and ETL tools, has long supported IBM i and mainframe systems, which continue to reliably automate business processes for many of the world’s largest companies.
In June, OpenLegacy announced that it was working with Boomi, the Dell Technologies business that provides Internet-based data integration tools. Boomi previously supported IBM i and mainframe environments, but by partnering with OpenLegacy, the company hopes to bolster how it works with those systems.
“With OpenLegacy, Boomi’s more than 11,000 customers will have greater access to complex legacy business logic and data, which can often take considerable time and resource to harness,” Reggie Penn, director of technology alliances for Boomi, said in a press release.
That same month, OpenLegacy announced a partnership with BigID, a provider of data discovery solutions that customers use to comply with emerging regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
What’s unique about BigID — and why it has raised $144 million in venture capital over the past couple of years — is how it uses machine learning techniques to help identify not only the obvious pieces of data that are sensitive — such as Social Security numbers or credit card numbers — but all the other pieces of data that could potentially bring a company afoul of CCPA and GDPR, such as IP addresses, GPS coordinates, and cookies.
Companies have this data squirreled away in all sorts of databases, file systems, and applications, both cloud and on-prem, and locating this data and assessing the legal and regulatory exposure is not a straightforward thing.
“Data privacy and compliance are paramount for any organization and BigID has emerged as a trusted leader in this space,” says Bo Luongo, OpenLegacy’s global senior vice president of alliances and business development, in a press release. “OpenLegacy’s platform is a natural fit for BigID’s customers as they seek to maximize the value of their data trapped in mainframes and other core legacy systems.”
In May, OpenLegacy announced a partnership with Collibra, one of the leading providers of a new class of software called a data catalog. Luongo said OpenLegacy was “a natural fit” for helping Collibra get access into core systems like IBM i and mainframes (IMS and VSAM).
“OpenLegacy parses the legacy assets, automatically generates code, and calls Collibra APIs for passing data into the platform,” Luongo states in a press release. “This is done without the need for specialized expertise such as COBOL programmers.”
Also in May, OpenLegacy unveiled a deal with GigaSpaces, which develops a fast in-memory data grid (IMDG) product upon which companies can build applications that require very low latencies and fast real-time processing.
The deal will see IBM i and mainframe data being exposed into the GigaSpaces InsightEdge IMDG via OpenLegacy APIs. This transactional data will be held in the GigaSpaces IMDG, enabling customers to make fast decisions on a greater amount of data. In some cases, workloads will be offloaded from the legacy database to the IMDG.
“GigaSpaces provides a 360-degree view of the data, meeting the growing requirements for speed, scale, and analytics while offloading from the mainframe to reduce TCO,” said Yoav Einav, vice president of products for GigaSpaces. “Partnering with OpenLegacy expands our offering’s options for mainframe modernization initiatives.”
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