Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Romi Stein, CEO of OpenLegacy (Part 1)

This is another segment in our ongoing exploration of the integration problem in cloud computing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as OpenLegacy.

Romi Stein: First of all, thank you for the opportunity. I am the CEO and one of the Co-Founders of OpenLegacy. I am an ex-IBM employee. I spent 15 years before co-founding OpenLegacy at IBM headquarters in New York. I was primarily in market and product development roles. There was a bunch of us from the founding team who came from prominent companies.

Our CTO and Co-Founder, Roi Mor, came from Software AG where he was doing research and development. There was a lot of innovation around containers and microservices from an infrastructure perspective. In the 2013 to 2014 timeframe, we realized that while there was an array of innovation and technology, a lot of them open-source, coming into the consumer world was taking place on startups.

When you looked at large organizations and enterprises, you typically saw that innovation stops at the digital. Most of the systems of record and most of the processes are still not there. To get there, you still have to use technologies that were developed two decades ago. That brought us to think that there must be a better way. That is how we started OpenLegacy. Our vision is to enable any enterprise to turn truly digital no matter how complex their IT infrastructure is. I need to explain what truly digital means, but let me stop for a second. 

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I am curious about the word legacy in your company name. Does it have something to do with the transition from a legacy system? What is the basis of naming that?

Romi Stein: That is a great question. When you think about the name OpenLegacy, it is actually an oxymoron. Everyone who is in the IT space knows that legacy is a great system that works well. It can sometimes work for decades. All the data, business processes, and applications of organizations can work for years.

The challenge for legacy is that it is very closed. It is very secure, but it is closed and inflexible. It is hard to do things that were not initially designed when those legacy systems were put in place. Sometimes those legacy systems go back into the ’70s. On the other hand, it is the opposite of everything open and flexible when you think about the name. That is what we do.

We combine the open aspect with legacy. We bring openness and flexibility while still preserving the richness of the data and the heritage of the idea and business processes that have been tested for years. In a nutshell, we are not thinking about moving away from the legacy.

If you talk about migration, then that is something that we can support. First of all, we are thinking about how efficient you are and how you can leverage your legacy systems via integration rather than migration by bringing those business processes and data and all the treasure that is in your organization into your new digital and competitive advantage.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Romi Stein, CEO of OpenLegacy
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