The year Software AG was founded provided two watershed moments in the future growth and direction of the technology industry.

It was 1969, and IBM Corp. announced in June that it would begin pricing its software and services separately from its hardware, laying the groundwork for an emergence of the modern software consulting industry. One month later, U.S. astronauts walked on the moon, a validation that technology could achieve what was once unthinkable.

Software AG, started that year in Germany by six young employees of the Institute of Applied Information Processing, has emerged as a multinational software business that provides enterprise tools for business process management, integration and big data analytics. For more than five and a half decades, the company has shown that it can adapt to the shifting tides of an industry that never stands still.

“Software AG continues to remain relevant by modernizing its legacy technology while moving into new growth areas,” said Paul Gillin, research analyst for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “The company’s Adabas database management system and Natural development language still have large installed bases, but the company’s growth has shifted to Aris business process management software, which, incidentally, has also been around for more than three decades but is just as relevant today as ever.”

Gillin was on the ground in Dublin, Ireland, for Software AG’s International User Groups Conference in April and spoke with key executives from the company and customers in exclusive interviews about the latest product enhancements for data integration, process management, artificial intelligence and internet of things orchestration for enterprises around the world. (* Disclosure below.)

Software AG Aris plays central role in business optimization

Software AG’s lengthy history in the process management arena has given the company a different perspective on software and its role in enabling enterprise applications. The firm invented its flagship Aris product in 1992, and Aris grew to become a tool used by enterprises for the documentation, design, analysis, assessment and optimization of key processes for running a business.

“When you talk about legacy, I talk about timeless software,” said Stefan Sigg, chief product officer of Software AG, during his conversation with theCUBE. “When software has been around a long time, it becomes timeless and it doesn’t matter anymore how old it is. My favorite example is Microsoft Excel; it’s been around for almost 40 years, but nobody is calling Excel a legacy. Nobody calls Software AG’s Aris legacy. It’s there to keep all those super mission-critical custom applications that were built on top of this technology running because they carry the company. That is what we are doing.”

During the International User Groups Conference in Dublin, Software AG enhanced its Aris process mining and Alfabet portfolio management products with generative AI. By leveraging Microsoft Corp.’s Azure OpenAI, Software AG is now providing the capability to depict existing processes and identify anomalies through the use of graphic formats.

“We continue to innovate … we can use AI to make Aris much more productive where you don’t have to dig into the data so much, but the AI is telling you what’s wrong,” Sigg said. “We mine the data, reconstruct the business processes and have key performance indicators attached to each and every instance. AI creates the summary without a human being needing to spend hours and hours analyzing each process instance.”

Earlier this year, Software AG released a study that identified a common challenge fueled by rapid expansion of technology within many enterprises. Results showed that 89% of organizations rapidly expanded technology over the course of several years, and more than three quarters or 76% indicated that this resulted in increased chaos to be managed. Over 40% pointed to the challenge of managing legacy and new systems together as a key factor in heightened complexity.

“The cloud is promising to make everything easier, but at least in an intermediate time, it’s making things much more complex because no company on this planet is making a 100% shift from being on-premises one day to the cloud,” Sigg explained. “Then there are SaaS services running somewhere and maybe edge cases where I have infrastructure and software running on a factory shop floor. These are four different things that I have to integrate. That is building complexity that you cannot avoid. It’s a question of managing that complexity with state-of-the-art integration software, IoT software, process management software and IT portfolio management software.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Stefan Sigg:

Use cases highlight support for migration and strategic planning

Migration of IT systems to a new platform is not only a complex process, it can also cripple a business dependent on enterprise resource planning and management functions necessary for smooth operation. Add on the sudden impact of a worldwide global COVID-19 pandemic, and this is the scenario that one Software AG customer found itself facing in 2020.

Celulose Nipo-Brasileira S.A., or Cenibra, is a major Brazilian producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp used for making paper and cardboard products. The company designed a plan to upgrade its legacy ERP system to SAP S/4HANA as a key step toward a modern IT infrastructure. Yet with the entire migration team having to work remotely when the upgrade began during the pandemic, the challenges were significant, according to Ronaldo Neves Ribeiro, IT and telecom manager at Cenibra, in his interview on theCUBE.

“It was a huge problem,” Ribeiro said. “We’d never managed projects remotely, but the directors decided to continue. It was planned and completed in 13 months with 178 people. It was the first S/4HANA migration in the world done completely remotely.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ronaldo Neves Ribeiro:

Announcements made during the conference included news that Software AG would enhance Alfabet 11, the company’s portfolio of management products, to provide process mining functionality for the IT landscape. New features included a Smart Data Workbench for customizing information displays, Data Quality rules that set parameters for acceptable quality and the application of reasoning-based AI to reduce product configuration effort.

The latest enhancements for Alfabet offered the British financial advisory company St. James Place PLC an opportunity to fine-tune its planning strategy.

“What we find that Alfabet brings for us is it has the ability for us to capture those high-level corporate strategic goals,” said Ian Batty, head of the Office of Architecture at St. James Place, in conversation with theCUBE. “Alfabet supports two distinct areas of usage, which is the enterprise architecture tool and the strategic portfolio management. I’m particularly focused on strategic portfolio management, and that means identifying where to spend your money, how much money you’ve got, what are the priorities you’ve got as a company.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ian Batty:

Growing complexity of IT environments has fueled interest in Software AG and its portfolio of process management solutions. The company was the subject of acquisition interest last year when the private equity firm Silver Lake competed with Rocket Software Inc. for a majority stake. Silver Lake prevailed and took the company private last fall. Since then, Software AG has sold its StreamSets and webMethods business to IBM Corp.

While Silver Lake has taken an approach to sell off some of Software AG’s assets, the company’s core business remains the same. The firm’s business process management software continues to attract major clients, a sign that despite the rapid pace of change today, enterprises will always need to optimize functions to remain successful.

“Processes are really at the heart of the organization, it’s the DNA of the organization,” said Josèphe Blondaut, head of ARIS product marketing at Software AG, during an interview with theCUBE. “It’s really about learning to learn, creating a culture of optimization and a culture of overall thinking, not thinking only in the specific silo you are working in. In the end, a company that looks at the processes, that looks at the operation will gain some kind of a learning success.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Josèphe Blondaut:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the International User Groups Conference, here’s our complete event video playlist:

Watch theCUBE’s full coverage of the International User Groups Conference event here:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the International User Groups Conference. Neither Software AG, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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