Every business has legacy infrastructure and software applications. Slow and expensive to maintain, these legacy systems drain budgets and create a vicious management cycle where keeping the old on-premises prevents new, cloud-based technology from being implemented.

Discarding unneeded legacy apps could free up the budget needed to become a 21^st century autonomous enterprise. But deciding what to ditch and what to keep isn’t always obvious.

Oracle Consulting is helping businesses make those determinations. “What are the things that they still need? What are the things that they can decommission?” asked Stephanie Trunzo (pictured), head of transformation and offerings at Oracle Consulting. “What are the things … you don’t have to do anything with because they are serving the purpose just fine?”

Trunzo spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as part of Oracle Consulting’s “Empowering the Autonomous Enterprise of the Future” initiative. They discussed how Oracle Consulting is using its experiences of transforming internally to guide its clients on their own transformation journeys. (* Disclosure below.)

IT adds intelligence as it moves from bimodal to trimodal

In 2015, Gartner Inc. coined the phrase bimodal to describe the dichotomy between two seemingly oppositional information-technology styles. The traditional, inflexible and slow systems of record versus the flexible and fast-paced digital culture that is focused around systems of engagement.

Five years on, with the threat of “go digital or die” looming, businesses are still struggling to merge the two styles into a cohesive workplace culture. And now another factor has entered the equation: artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning — aka: systems of intelligence.

As part of its quest to guide customers toward autonomous business operations, Oracle Consulting is working on integrating not just systems of record and engagement, but systems of intelligence as well.

“The trimodal IT concept is three different systems and how they interlock and relate to one another,” Trunzo said. “If you think about systems of record, the currency, so to speak, for systems of record are processes. If you think about the currency for systems of interaction, it’s the people, it’s the users, it’s the humans. And the currency for the system of intelligence is data.”

Data is the common factor underlying all three, according to Trunzo. And data is Oracle Consulting’s raison d’être.

“When we’re looking at all three of those systems and you’re looking at it from an Oracle [Consulting] perspective, data is at the heart of even systems of record, of even systems of interaction, not only the systems of intelligence,” she said. “Collecting and leveraging data from all three systems is going to be what fuels your system of intelligence going forward.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle Consulting’s Empowering the Autonomous Enterprise of the Future initiative. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Oracle Consulting Empowering the Autonomous Enterprise program. Neither Oracle Consulting, the sponsor for theCUBE’s coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE