Solutions
Replace & migrate from your legacy workflow engine
Operaton is a community-driven, free, and open-source engine capable of executing BPMN, DMN and CMMN
Is your legacy workflow or BPM system holding your business back? If you’re struggling with high licensing costs, slow and cumbersome change cycles, a lack of integration capabilities, and a shrinking pool of specialized developers, you are not alone. These rigid, monolithic systems, once the backbone of your operations, have become a barrier to innovation in today’s fast-paced digital world.
Replacing your legacy engine isn’t just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic necessity to unlock business agility, embrace modern architectures, and drastically reduce your total cost of ownership. This page outlines how to approach this migration successfully and the transformative benefits that await.
How to Successfully Replace a Legacy Workflow Engine
A “big bang” approach, where you try to replace the entire system at once, is fraught with risk, high costs, and a high probability of failure. A modern, agile migration strategy is phased, iterative, and designed to deliver value quickly while minimizing business disruption. We recommend a proven, three-step approach.
Step 1: Co-exist and Contain (The Strangler Fig Pattern)
Don’t turn off the old system yet. Start by deploying a modern, lightweight process automation platform alongside your legacy engine. All new processes are built on the modern platform. For processes that must interact with the old system, you can build a facade or anti-corruption layer. This contains the legacy system and stops it from growing, effectively “strangling” it over time.
Step 2: Migrate in Phases
Analyze and catalog the processes running on your legacy system. Prioritize them based on business value, user-facing impact, or technical simplicity. Begin migrating these processes iteratively, one by one or in logical groups. With each successful migration, you demonstrate value to the business, build momentum, and gain valuable experience, making each subsequent step easier and faster.
Step 3: Decommission with Confidence
Once all business logic, processes, and historical data have been successfully migrated to the new, modern platform, you can finally decommission the legacy system. This phased approach ensures you can pull the plug with full confidence, zero business disruption, and a complete, modern solution already running in its place.
Why Update? The 3 Biggest Benefits of a Modern Engine
Updating your workflow engine delivers transformative results, moving your organization from a slow, reactive state to a fast, agile, and proactive one.
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1. Unlock Unprecedented Business Agility and Speed
Legacy systems can take months to update. A modern process automation platform allows you to design, automate, and deploy new processes in days or even hours. By using the universal standard BPMN, business and IT can collaborate seamlessly. Combined with modern DevOps practices (CI/CD), you can respond to market changes, launch new products, and optimize customer journeys at a speed your competitors can't match.
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2. Embrace an Open, Scalable, and Extensible Architecture
Move away from a proprietary "black box" system. Modern engines are open, standards-based, and built for today's distributed architectures. They are developer-friendly, using common languages like Java, and integrate natively with microservices, APIs, and modern message busses. This allows you to seamlessly orchestrate end-to-end processes across your entire technology stack and scale effortlessly in any cloud environment.
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3. Drastically Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
The financial benefits of modernization are substantial. Eliminate exorbitant licensing and maintenance fees from legacy vendors. Reduce your reliance on a small, expensive pool of specialized developers by using a platform built on widely-known open standards. By automating previously manual workarounds and improving operational efficiency, you can achieve a significant and rapid return on your investment.
Critical Success Factors for Your Migration
A successful migration project depends on more than just technology. To ensure a smooth transition and maximize your ROI, focus on these three key factors:
- Adopt a Phased Strategy: A “big bang” replacement is too risky. The phased, co-existence strategy outlined above is the single most important factor in ensuring a successful, low-risk migration.
- Ensure Business & IT Alignment: A legacy migration must be a shared strategic initiative, not just an IT project. Secure executive sponsorship and ensure both business and technical teams are aligned on the goals, priorities, and expected outcomes.
- Choose the Right Modern Platform: Select a platform that is lightweight, scalable, standards-based (BPMN, DMN), and developer-friendly. Your new engine should empower your teams, not create another form of vendor lock-in.
