WHITEPAPER

HOW APIS CAN

MODERNIZE
LEGACY
SYSTEMS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Legacy systems, which form the backbone of many We’ll introduce you to some of these companies
enterprises, are holding organizations back from leveraging and show how:
new digital technologies and creating new experiences
for their customers, stakeholders, and partners. Many • Siemens increased project delivery speed by 50% and
organizations find it difficult to modernize or extend their decreased the time required to deliver new project MVP
legacy systems in a way that enables them to create an by half
IT strategy that supports the quick adoption of newer
• Mount Sinai Health System decreased the amount of
technologies such as cloud, big data, IoT, and mobile.
time needed to extract data from legacy systems from
When they do attempt to modernize their legacy systems, months, down to days and weeks.
many organizations connect new systems to their legacy
• Government agency Service New South Wales increased
databases and software with point-to-point integration––
delivery of service through digital channels by 50%,
leading to tight dependencies between systems and creating
achieving a 97% customer satisfaction rating.
a brittle, costly, hard-to-maintain infrastructure. For a better
legacy modernization strategy, organizations must move
In an era where change is the only constant, creating new
beyond point-to-point integration and embrace an API-
products, services, and experiences is crucial. With API-led
based integration strategy: API-led connectivity.
connectivity, organizations will no longer feel locked by
legacy systems; instead, they can modernize, extend, and
Companies across various industries have used API-led
API-ify these systems in order to become more nimble and
connectivity to modernize their legacy systems, with
better respond to emerging technologies and other changes.
dramatic results.

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INTRODUCTION
It’s the classic question: should IT spend its time
maintaining legacy investments or creating new things?
In a recent survey, 90% of IT decision makers say legacy
systems are holding their organizations back from using
digital technologies to innovate or make operational
efficiencies, and over a third believe that legacy systems are
a barrier to completing IT projects.
For most established enterprises, core data and services
that serve as the heart and lungs of the business are siloed
within legacy systems. Legacy modernization refers to the
process of adapting these older legacy systems to support
modern business and technology needs.
As agile upstarts continue displacing established incumbent
organizations across all industries, the imperative to adopt
(and adapt to) modern technologies and platforms, such
as cloud, big data, IoT, mobile, has never been greater. In
this era – where change is constant, customers are fickle,
and established business models are disrupted every day –
maintaining old systems won’t be enough to survive.
Legacy systems, which form the backbone of many
enterprises, were not developed to support the
implementation and adoption of these technologies.
Consequently, as the number of digital transformation
initiatives and the speed with which they must be delivered
intensifies, IT leaders become overwhelmed by the sheer
number of requests for data feeds from legacy systems.
Moreover, existing legacy interfaces, developed in a world
of daily batch calls, are not fit for purpose for today’s digital
channels that require real-time data.
Organizations must modernize their systems to ensure the
technologies they use provide a competitive edge in the
market and, more importantly, meet changing business
initiatives and customer needs.
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COMMON APPROACHES TO LEGACY MODERNIZATION
First, how does the legacy modernization journey begin?
Here are some common approaches that organizations take
when dealing with legacy systems:
• They can rip and replace their old systems and put in
entirely new ones wholesale
• They can enable web functionality within these systems
through custom code
Both of these approaches have their drawbacks. In the first,
it’s difficult to justify the time and expense necessary for
a rip-and-replace approach, and for businesses that have
to pivot and adjust to change quickly, it’s very difficult to
keep business operations afloat while entirely replacing
legacy systems.
In the second approach, the majority of the data and
systems are connected through point-to-point integration,
so with every project an organization embarks on that
involves data within a legacy system, they have to write new
point-to-point code again and again in order to connect
these systems and expose any relevant data.
When point-to-point is used in organizations with small
infrastructures, where only 2-3 systems must be integrated,
it works quite well. The reality, however, is that the
average enterprise organization has over 65 legacy and
modern applications and systems, and that’s just in a
single department. In this case, point-to-point integrations
create an exponential number of connections. Hundreds of
systems are tightly coupled together, making it difficult to
easily retire or modernize existing systems.
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Traditional architectural approaches centered around
point-to-point integration are unable to address legacy
modernization well. This type of integration also creates a
dependence on specialized teams that are more familiar
with these products; this creates bottlenecks, increases
maintenance costs, and reduces budget for innovation
and net new projects. More importantly, point-to-point
integration builds architectural brittleness over time, making
organizations less flexible and adaptive to change.
Organizations have to find a third option: to move beyond
these two approaches and embrace APIs.
APIs hold the key to exposing data from these systems
by exposing that data in a way that protects the integrity
of the system, enables secure and governed access,
and accelerates developer productivity. Doing so allows
organizations with older systems to adapt to modern
business needs, thereby increasing their ability to quickly
adopt new technologies and platforms.
This becomes crucial because legacy modernization is not an
an end in itself; rather, it’s a strategic enabler to provide the
business with long-term flexibility to meet evolving IT needs.
What will the business’ strategic goals be a year from now
or a decade into the future? Nobody wants to keep creating
new point-to-point code to endlessly keep up with new
business objectives.
This is why organizations looking to adopt new technologies,
improve the achieve business initiatives, or meet customer
demands, should think about legacy modernization in the
long-term.
This requires building a foundation for change––providing
organizations with the ability to better adapt to technology
and customer shifts in the near and far-off future.
In order to create an agile, future-proof architecture that
supports a long-term strategy for legacy modernization,
organizations must move beyond point-to-point integration
and embrace a new approach: API-led connectivity.
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FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR INFASTRUCTURE WITH API-LED
CONNECTIVITY
API-led connectivity is a methodical way to connect data to applications through reusable and purposeful APIs. With this
approach, APIs are designed and productized for a specific purpose and play one of these roles within specific API layers:
unlocking data from systems (System APIs), composing data into processes (Process APIs), or delivering an experience
(Experience APIs).

The APIs must be reusable and discoverable by the rest of the organization. By building and organizing your APIs this way,
and then making them discoverable and available for the business to self-serve, API-led connectivity can make business
composable––allowing teams throughout the business to compose, recompose, and adapt these APIs to address the
changing needs of the business.

If you have a project that requires the use of an IBM Mainframe, for example, a reusable API that exposes the information
contained in that database means that it is accessible to anyone who needs to use it, without waiting for IT to create a
custom-coded point-to-point connection. As a result, projects requiring that information can be completed much faster
simply by utilizing that API.

By exposing systems through APIs, and composing or recomposing them, teams can create an API infrastructure that
enables plugging data, applications, and systems (e.g. Salesforce, Facebook, and other modern apps) more easily to
API-fied legacy systems. This makes retiring or modernizing systems much easier.

With this API infrastructure, known as an application network, old legacy systems can be extended through APIs and new
systems can be plugged into the network as easily as plugging in a printer. With an API-led connectivity, organizations can
better realize their business initiatives––whether it is building a mobile app or improving the partner experience.

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MODERNIZE LEGACY SYSTEMS WITHOUT DISRUPTION

MuleSoft has helped hundreds of companies overcome the
challenges of legacy modernization. MuleSoft’s Anypoint
Platform exposes legacy systems with their legacy data
formats and transport protocols in a straightforward way.
An implementation for a legacy modernization use case
typically involves the following:
• Orchestration – Composing several fine-grained
legacy components into a single higher-order
composite service. This can be done to achieve
appropriate granularity of services and promote
reuse and manageability.
• Data transformation – Transformation between
legacy system formats and standards-based data
formats. Examples include transforming between CSV,
COBOL copybook, or EDI formats to either SOAP/XML,
REST or JSON.
• Transport protocol negotiation – Transport protocol
negotiation between legacy transports such as file-
based applications, FTP, traditional email (SMTP) or
proprietary messaging formats and contemporary
internet-based HTTP protocols.
• Mediation - Providing support for multiple interfaces
for the purpose of a) supporting multiple versions of a
service for backwards compatibility, or b) allowing for
multiple channels to the same underlying component
implementation. The second requirement may involve
providing multiple interfaces to the same component-
one legacy interface (fat file) and one standards-
compliant (REST, SOAP/XML) interface.
• Non-functional consistency – In legacy modernization
projects, this can involve providing a new secure
channel (including authentication and authorization)
for external consumers of legacy components that
were originally designed with only internal consumers
in mind.
Let’s look at a very simple example of these capabilities in
action. In the following example, a REST API exposed using
APIKit returns employee information after a ‘GET’ request
is made to the ‘/employees’ API. The API abstracts the
user from the legacy implementation, which in this case
is a legacy database. This shows the data transformation
capabilities made possible by Anypoint Platform’s data
transformation component, DataWeave.

This example demonstrates how to leverage an investment

in an existing system by taking existing database
functionality and exposing it as a web service. This design
promotes loose coupling, since consumers are now
interfacing with Anypoint Platform instead of invoking the
component directly.

In this way, the platform dramatically simplifies the

process of onboarding additional requirements regarding
transformations, transports, orchestrations, service
mediation, and even non-functional requirements.

One of the key benefits of this solution is its simplicity.

MuleSoft’s solution doesn’t require specialized developer
knowledge or costly training programs. Development teams
can start to modernize existing applications in a fraction of
the time it takes with alternative solutions.

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HOW OUR CUSTOMERS TACKLE LEGACY MODERNIZATION
API-led connectivity lays the foundation for a long-term legacy modernization strategy; this can be seen through the
experiences of Siemens, the largest manufacturing and electronics company in Europe, Mount Sinai, one of the oldest
integrated health systems in the United States, and Service New South Wales, an award-winning government initiative.
MANUFACTURING
CASE STUDY: SIEMENS
Siemens is the largest manufacturing and electronics
company in Europe, with over 351,000 employees across
the world. The company was charged with rolling out 60
million smart meters to accommodate a UK climate change
regulation; as a result, they needed a more efficient way
of managing their complex network of devices, vendors,
and suppliers.
With MuleSoft, Siemens leveraged APIs to unlock siloed
services and data residing within their legacy IBM
mainframes, and to expose this data to their network
of service providers. This API-driven approach to legacy
modernization has enabled them to allow mobile and web
applications to consume relevant data.
HEALTHCARE
CASE STUDY: MOUNT SINAI
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the oldest integrated
healthcare systems in the U.S., with 7 hospitals, 1 medical
school, 15 institutes, and over 40,000 employees, physicians,
and residents.
At Mount Sinai, where 2.6 million patients visit annually,
whenever a doctor saw a patient, they had to look through
an average of 5 applications to understand their medical
record. Additionally, Mount Sinai partners with community
partners, such as the Salvation Army, to support community
care initiatives. These partners had no visibility into a
patient’s medical record––preventing caseworkers from
effectively coordinating with Mount Sinai to provide better
care to the patient.
This not only contributed to a superior partner and
customer experience for Siemens, but also allowed them to
maintain the downstream integrity of these systems through
throttling and rate limiting API policies. Furthermore,
Siemens has been able to repurpose these APIs to expose
energy consumption data to regulatory authorities in
real-time––eliminating the need to manually prepare and
submit reports.
Using MuleSoft, Siemens has increased project delivery
speed by 50%. They’ve cut down the amount of time
required to deliver new project MVPs in half. And in doing
so, they’ve laid a foundation to help the business rapidly
innovate and redefine how energy is consumed.
The number of siloed data sources challenged efforts to
improve the patient experience and streamline how doctors
provide care, demanding a new approach to connectivity.
To address the lack of data interoperability and modernize
their legacy systems, Mount Sinai turned to their IT team
to transform care by building a single patient view and
improving coordination between physicians, caseworkers,
and community care providers. This required breaking the
silos between both legacy and modern medical and non-
medical data, applications, systems, and devices used by
Mount Sinai teams and community partners.
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Using MuleSoft, Mount Sinai was able to unlock these
systems using APIs and bring together siloed data in a
variety of applications and systems—from medical systems
to billing applications. This API-driven approach enabled
them to build a single patient view, where doctors can see a
patient’s medical record through a unified lens.
By bringing together siloed data and establishing better
collaboration with community care providers, Mount Sinai
can now promote preventive care practices, reduce ER
re-admissions and, in turn, improve care and lower costs.
Mount Sinai can now ensure that not only is this visibility
available to care providers, but community partners and
caseworkers too.
PUBLIC SECTOR
CASE STUDY: SERVICE NEW SOUTH WALES
Service New South Wales (Service NSW) is a government
initiative focused on delivering services to citizens—
including driver licenses, birth certificates, senior cards, and
more. They sought to improve the customer experience by
becoming a “one-stop-shop” for all citizen needs.
In order to achieve this objective, Service NSW embarked
on an initiative to improve the customer experience by
making these government services accessible to citizens
from a single place—whether it is in-person, online, or
through mobile.
This required integrating data from government
departmental IT systems with Salesforce and other systems
of record, in a secure manner.
“The biggest value of MuleSoft to us has been time,”
says Kash Patel, Vice President of Population Health at
Mount Sinai. “We went from months in the traditional
sense of getting data from the source systems down to
days and weeks.”
With API-led connectivity, Service NSW modernized legacy
back-end systems with APIs, exposing over 40 external
government departments and agencies in a manner that
didn’t risk compromising system security. Today, the
infrastructure they built is not based on point-to-point code,
but emphasizes an API-first approach that allows Service
NSW to expose legacy systems with APIs in a scalable and
flexible manner.
By taking an API-led approach to legacy modernization,
Service NSW was able to consolidate their services and
become a one-stop-shop for all government services.
As a result, they increased the delivery of digital services
by 50% and drastically improved the customer experience
by achieving a 97% customer satisfaction rating from
2 million customers.
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MULESOFT’S UNIQUE IMPACT
Siemens, Mount Sinai, and Service NSW chose MuleSoft to
guide them in their legacy modernization journey. MuleSoft’s
Anypoint Platform, an integration platform for connecting
SaaS and enterprise applications, allows organizations to
move away from point-to-point custom integrations.
Instead, it enables organizations to achieve their business
objectives more quickly by reaping the benefits of API-led
connectivity. The platform is the only unified solution in the
market for the full API lifecycle—from designing, and
building to testing and deploying.
Anypoint Platform increases speed and helps lower the cost
of maintaining APIs, integrations, and applications because
it is a single management platform. As a result, customers
witness a 65% average increase in speed and a 40-80%
reduction in maintenance costs.
Anypoint Platform also helps organizations achieve a variety
of other business objectives—from improving the employee
experience by increasing developer on-ramp speed by 65%
to streamlining the release of new products and services by
increasing project speed by two-thirds.
In an era where change is the only constant, creating new
products, services, and experiences is crucial for business
success. Legacy systems are and will remain a reality at most
organizations; however, neither connecting these systems
through point-to-point integration nor ripping and replacing
are viable.
IIt is necessary for organizations to be more nimble in order
to innovate faster and maintain systems simultaneously.
With an API-led approach to legacy modernization,
organizations like Siemens, Mount Sinai, and Service NSW
have become more adaptable to change and, in turn, can
now launch new products, services, and experiences to
customers more quickly.
Take a look at further resources about legacy modernization
or contact us to learn more.
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MuleSoft’s mission is to help organizations change and innovate faster by making it easy to connect the world’s applications,
data and devices. With its API-led approach to connectivity, MuleSoft’s market-leading Anypoint Platform™ is enabling over
1,000 organizations in approximately 60 countries to build application networks.

For more information, visit www.mulesoft.com.