For last night’s Tech Intelligence Dinner, sponsored by CAST Software, the chosen location was the lavish L’oscar London in Holborn.

L’oscar is a place that beautifully blends history, opulence, and playful irreverence. The juxtaposition of its Edwardian roots with bold, Parisian-inspired design elements must create a visually stunning and unique atmosphere. The architectural mix of “Wrenaissance” and Arts & Crafts influences, paired with the theatrical touches like the peacock motif and butterfly wing taps, seems to strike a perfect balance between sophistication and fun.

Today, many organisations rely on business-critical applications originating decades ago that have become difficult to adapt to the ever-evolving needs of the business. The all too common loss of technical and functional knowledge further exacerbates the problem.

Maintaining these legacy applications can be challenging. Specifically, resource availability, keeping up with the pace of change and the need for improved functionality, flexibility at lower costs. Thus, many enterprises are challenged with modernising their legacy applications, but do not know where to start and what their options are.

It was these challenges and more importantly the solution that attendees were keen to learn more about, to deal with their own individual issues.

Over a four-course fine dining experience, guests learnt how CAST Imaging reverse engineers and automatically ‘understands’ software systems built with any mix of 3GL, 4GL, Mobile, Web, Middleware, Framework, Database, Mainframe technologies.

Creating accurate, zoomable architecture blueprints of all database structures, code components, and their interdependencies. Down to the slightest details. You can see the transaction flows and tag the components using functional knowledge from the application users.

The evening was an opportunity for guests to meet with their peers and share experiences, with some of the UK leading companies. Where they had the chance to discuss the benefits of leveraging software intelligence, while planning and executing legacy app modernisation.

Overall, it was an intense evening of questions, clearly demonstarting that the issues of legacy applications will be with companies for many years to come.