GOOGLE CLOUD NEXT, SAN FRANCISCO – The past is coming back to haunt enterprises looking to make the leap into the cloud in the form of thorny technical debt. But it seems generative AI is both a driving force compelling them to overcome that obstacle as well as a potential solution to the problem.
Technical debt refers to all the shortcuts and other non-optimal implementations organizations have deployed in their environments in the past. Interestingly, the term surfaced in a handful of conversations we had during Google’s Cloud Next event in San Francisco.
Sumit Kaushik is head of technology, media and telecom at digital engineering and technology service company Virtusa. If you haven’t heard of them, the company recently posted $1.9 billion in revenue and has nearly 40,000 employees and more than 220 clients scattered across a more than 25-country footprint.
Kaushik told Silverlinings that enterprises are in various stages of cloud migration, with some further along than others. Many — particularly those in the telecom industry — who are moving at a slower pace are wrangling with how exactly to tackle technical debt before making the leap to the cloud.
Keep up with the all the news from Google Cloud Next 2023 with our dedicated news hub here.
“That is slowing them down significantly,” he said. “Their modernization journeys are not at the maturity stage for them to start doing automation at scale – don’t get me wrong, they’re still doing it, but it’s not at scale for them to drive a lot of change and innovation.”
And that means these organizations are still running systems that are now quite old. Kaushik said one unnamed customer with a large ecommerce app is still running on the oldest version of Java.
It’s not so much that there’s a problem with these old apps or architectures working. It’s that they’re depriving companies access to new tools, features and insights that could improve products and customer experiences, he explained. That includes artificial intelligence (AI).
AI to the rescue?
Chirag Dekate, VP and analyst at Gartner, told Silverlinings that the desire to capitalize on AI capabilities will drive even organizations who haven’t started the journey to the cloud at all to do so. That’s because while they could technically build the necessary technology stack to run AI on-premises, it would require building in new layers of complexity and learning third party apps and services.
“Enterprises will have to make a fundamental choice,” he said. “The further you kick the can down the road, the further delayed you’re going to be on your value creation journey.”
For those facing what they perceive as insurmountable technical debt, Dekate said generative AI (GenAI) could provide an answer.
“GenAI is not just going to be an application that you’re going to be leveraging in your home organization context, but it’s likely going to be a key migration asset that you will end up using as you on-ramp into cloud ecosystems,” he said.
He specifically pointed to the Duet AI solutions Google showcased at Cloud Next. And while GenAI is “not the silver bullet” for solving technical debt, Dekate argued “now getting into cloud, migrating into cloud has never been easier.”
Want to learn how to maximize your cloud investment? Check out our Cloud Executive Summit in beautiful Sonoma, Calif., from Dec. 6-7.