By now, you are likely familiar with the painful system outage at Delta Airlines, which followed a failed CrowdStrike update, causing global disruptions across nearly all industries. The situation has escalated, with finger-pointing and lawsuits dominating the headlines. Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Airlines, stated that the airline had to cancel more than 5,000 flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded and costing the airline up to $500 million. To help get back online, the company had to manually reset 40,000 servers, according to Bastian. Meanwhile, Microsoft has countered by asserting that Delta Airlines’ outdated IT infrastructure is to blame for the airline’s inability to recover as quickly as its industry peers. Adding to the chaos, Delta passengers have filed a class-action lawsuit against the airline over the cancellations caused by the extended outage.

Regardless of which narrative you believe, this convoluted situation raises a crucial question:

Was the extended Delta outage preventable, and could your organization be the next Delta Airlines?

The Legacy Code Dilemma

Legacy code residing in mainframe systems, monolithic applications, and other custom-built legacy systems presents a challenging paradox to many enterprises. These systems typically run mission-critical parts of the business in a mostly reliable fashion. However, the complexities and inflexibility of legacy systems drive up maintenance expenses and slow down business processes. Integrating legacy software can feel like wading through molasses, leading to delays, stability issues, and innovation slowdowns. Performance and scalability problems directly impact user satisfaction and revenue potential. Moreover, legacy software often contains vulnerabilities, leading to financial and legal headaches, as magnified by Delta’s current quagmire. Kicking the can down the road in this case has created significant shareholder impact.

If it’s understood that legacy debt is less than ideal and a potential time bomb, why are there still enterprises running their businesses on systems and software that can be up to 40 years old? The challenge for many companies is that the journey to modernize these applications is daunting:

• It can often take many person-years to fully document and understand legacy code and its tentacles.
• Personnel with deep knowledge of the application may no longer be available, and finding and retaining people to work on legacy languages can be difficult.

The risks and costs associated with these barriers often delay or prevent much-needed modernization, with the perceived return on risk being unsupportable.

But what if advances in generative AI, coupled with real ingenuity, could completely change how we think about the legacy infrastructure paradox?

Introducing 3PO: The AI-Powered Solution

After being challenged by the CEO of a global bank to “solve their legacy software problem,” Dualboot Partners created an innovation lab comprised of its best engineers. Their goal was to identify how AI could be leveraged in new ways to address the barriers to modernization. For years, software and services companies have promised solutions to these barriers, but they have mostly been vaporware aimed at producing expensive consulting projects. Dualboot, however, has been building innovative software solutions focused on growing the businesses of our clients. Empty promises and bait-and-switch tactics are unacceptable.

The result? 3PO, an AI-powered legacy code translator that can speed up documentation by 50x and new scaffolding and source creation by 4-8x.

Most importantly, 3PO actually works.

3PO begins by reading legacy source code and translating it into detailed documentation, complete with user stories. The value of this detailed documentation saves person-years of tedious work and reduces risk. 3PO’s AI solution then creates a complete requirements document, which can be augmented with additional requirements from other files. Now, 3PO can create scaffolding for the targeted application code base along with automated test cases.

Simply put, 3PO has flipped the script on the risks and costs associated with modernizing legacy code.

Delta is paying the price for neglecting its legacy code problem; your business doesn’t have to fall into the same trap. Want to learn more? Contact us now for a tailored demo of 3PO in action and provide a complimentary proof of concept on your code.