OpenLegacy is focused on API integration with legacy mainframe systems, and are strong in Canada with the large banks and insurance companies that built their IT in the mainframe era.

Companies which facilitate API integration with their platforms are not a rare species today. OpenLegacy is a rather distinct player within this space, however, in that they are specifically focused on API integration with legacy mainframe systems like VSAM, AS/400, and IMS, to provide an easy way for them to use modern APIs. OpenLegacy has a broad partner ecosystem, and they have just expanded that, with a new partnership with data discovery vendor BigID.

“Our customers are enterprises who have been around long enough to have mission-critical apps on mainframes that are too troublesome to migrate,” said Bo Luongo, OpenLegacy’s global SVP of alliances and business development. “These big players understand they have to be able to handle legacy data with modern APIs and we hope to become the de facto option for that.”

Luongo has spent the last 20-plus years in the integration space, most recently with Mulesoft, where he ran the global OEM practice there, staying through the 2018 acquisition by Salesforce until moving to OpenLegacy in January 2020. Before that he was at Informatica for a decade, ultimately becoming their director of worldwide alliances.

“Mulesoft pioneered the API-led approach to integration and was fantastic at providing the glue across all integration points,” Luongo said. Mulesoft did not, however, have the expertise to connect to legacy mainframe environments, which are still important in most larger enterprises. Luongo sees OpenLegacy as bringing this ‘last mile’ capability to mainframes, filling out the rest of the integration space.

“These legacy environments aren’t going away because it’s too problematic to migrate their mission critical apps to newer environments,” Luongo said. “They are still in 71% of the Fortune 500, in 92 of the top 100 banks, and 23 of the top 25 retailers. We focus on providing the bridge to leapfrog integration challenges between legacy mainframes and new digital initiatives. Services-oriented organizations address this, but no one else is productizing a solution.”

OpenLegacy was founded in Israel in 2013, and is now headquartered in Princeton New Jersey. They started selling globally in 2017.

“We have singular product, an Eclipse-based studio, with a unique approach to core legacy connector generation,” Luongo said. “Our Automatic Code Generation constructs APIs to legacy systems 20x faster, at 75% lower cost per API for the lifecycle and with a 5x API latency improvement.” It all cuts digital transformation project times in half.

OpenLegacy sells through a hybrid model, with a broad range of partners. While global systems integrators are frequently their competitors, there is a lot of co-opetition there, especially in regional markets.

“We tend to see great alignment at the regional level,” Luongo said. “Accenture Canada for example is a tremendous partner.” They also have VAR and OEM partners to scale out their business, and a broad range of co-opetitors among ISVs which include MuleSoft, Apigee, AWS, and Compuware.

“Our more recent partnerships include Gigaspaces, which does in-memory processing and analytics,” Luongo said. “We are the last mile of integration for them.” Other new ones include Fujitsu RunMyProcess, a low-code iPaaS provider, and data governance provider Collibra, the latter of which is also a competitor.

The newest strategic partner, BigID, is a New York-based data discovery and intelligence platform which is particularly focused on the protection of personally identifiable information [PII].

“We were in pursuit of an opportunity with a large financial services company, and they worked with BigID,” Luongo said. “BigID embedded our technology so that it is part of their offering.” The integration allows BigID’s data intelligence platform to gain easy access to the sensitive data which had been locked in core mainframe and midrange systems.