The end of Java is here! At last, a way to break free from the tech debt treadmill.
After a successful rollout of four Unqork applications, the CIO of a major US bank told WatersTechnology’s editor-in-chief Anthony Malakian he wants to leverage Unqork for a much wider mission to modernize legacy systems.
“We’ll probably be moving half a dozen of our more mission-critical applications over to Unqork,” the CIO said. “Our goal is to essentially eliminate the Java stack entirely over the next, say, five years before we’re done.”
It just doesn’t get better than this. This is exactly what Unqork was built to achieve.
Here is the full story from WatersTechnology. You can also download a free PDF version.
By Anthony Malakian, Editor-in-Chief, WatersTechnology Group
Published: December 4, 2024
It’s around this time of year that I like to catch up with sources whom I haven’t spoken with in a while to have a bit of a catch-up. I don’t have an agenda, but I’m more interested in hearing about what they think are some major trends that will unfold in the coming year.
So it was last week that I talked with the chief information officer of a US bank whom I’ve known for some time. After exchanging pleasantries, they started to tell me about a really interesting project they’re currently working on. I’m keeping their identity a secret simply because we didn’t have time to get legal approval for this information to be publicly shared—normally, they’re very open and candid, but I have a deadline and I wanted to share this story with my readers before the code-freeze kicks in and people start leaving the office for the holidays.
In 2021, the CIO and their team were facing what increasingly felt like an insurmountable problem: their infrastructure was largely built on the Java tech stack, which includes a database, a whole bunch of libraries, a web server, operating, middleware, and more. What the CIO was finding was that those things seemed to be going out of support faster and faster in recent years, primarily because of security vulnerabilities.
“We feel like we were paddling as hard as we could to keep up, and we keep falling behind. So I came to the conclusion a few years ago that the current process of just having this Java stack and trying to paddle and keep up was unsustainable,” they told me.
The bank had just finally moved its Java tech stack from Version 9 to Version 10, and they were making plans to start the process of upgrading to Version 11. It was at this point that the CIO was informed that 9 was already obsolete.
“I was like, ‘What?! It’s only been a year and a half—it’s going to take us five years to get everything over to 11!’ So, I said, ‘This is unsustainable; stop— we’re not doing this again. We had to do something else, but I didn’t even know what the something else was; I just said, ‘We’re not doing this anymore.’”
Fortuitously, it was around this time when a consultancy told the CIO that they should look at the vendors in the low-code/no-code development space. The bank started to kick the tires on Unqork, a no-code vendor. (Note to readers: For the purpose of this column, I’m going to use the term no-code from here on out, but vendors like Unqork, Genesis, and Mendix, among others, will tell you there are significant differences between the two terms. For me, I think it’s a bit of branding hype. Since we’re talking about Unqork here, though, we’ll stick with no-code.)
The CIO says they were skeptical at first. As the links above will show, there was a lot of skepticism around no-code development. But they did a deep-dive study into the technology and opinions slowly started to change, and the bank eventually signed on with Unqork.
Over the last year, the bank has worked on “low hanging fruit” applications, meaning four low-risk, non-business critical applications. They’ve used this as a test to see if they comfortable moving critical apps onto the Unqork platform—and it would seem they are.
“We really, really believe in it; it’s a major strategic move for us,” says the CIO. “For next year, we’ll probably be moving half a dozen of our more mission-critical applications over to Unqork. Our goal is to essentially eliminate the Java stack entirely over the next, say, five years before we’re done. But directionally, that’s where we’re going.”
The big battle
Technical debt is a scourge on a bank—yet, it’s a very difficult problem for heads of technology to explain to business leaders, much less a board of directors. The CIO says that they’ve essentially removed technical debt as it relates to the four applications they’ve moved over to Unqork.
About a decade ago, the CIO started to have their security team provide detailed metrics that looked at how many unpatched vulnerabilities the bank had. That number could be, they say, well over 1,000—even 5,000. When those numbers were presented to the Board, the executives would be in shock and think that the IT department wasn’t doing its job adequately.
The thing is that if you have, say, 500 servers and for each you have, on average, 10 significant vulnerabilities, the threat surface rapidly expands. And it’s important to remember that firms get in the range of 100 vulnerability updates per week; and every patch that is released can’t just immediately be put into production because they are, by definition, patches and could blow up once in a live environment—they need to be tested during down times. At the same time, each vulnerability left unpatched can let a hacker in. Legacy systems are the most vulnerable and, thus, need to be well monitored, which adds to technical debt.
Unqork (and the other no-code providers) have one code base that all clients are run on. “If one patch is applied, it’s applied to everybody, and it’s their responsibility, and we don’t do it at all—so that problem goes away 100% when you go to one of these platforms,” says the CIO.
And that’s the defensive side of the equation. On the offensive side of the ball—meaning, business needs—there’s been growing support because things get done faster. Defending against vulnerabilities was one big “Aha!” moment for the CIO. The second was the speed that users were able to spin up new products.
During the pandemic, Unqork made a splash by landing the City of New York as a client as officials looked to roll out its Covid-19 contract tracing engagement portal in a matter of days. The CIO was in a meeting with Unqork representatives and was floored that from the time the problem was proposed by City officials to the rollout of a tool, it took about a week.
“That was the other ‘Aha!’ moment—this stuff can get done really, really fast,” they say. “You can’t do that in a Java stack—no chance, not in a week from the ask.”
During our conversation, I tell the source that I feel like a lot of tech companies are throwing around the term no-code development in press releases, but when I talk to other bank and asset manager heads of tech, they don’t much use the term. And it’s something that will be sprinkled in at conferences (even our own), but few have been passionate about the subject. Essentially, it’s kind of like “AI-powered” or “fully cloud-enabled” or “blockchain is the future”—once everyone starts using the term, it gets watered down, and users start to get very skeptical.
Clearly, this CIO is a convert, but he also thinks that others will find religion as more services move to the cloud (which they say is a good thing—90% of their bank’s infrastructure is now in the cloud, as they also work with Snowflake). But while cloud and AI are great, the threat surface for banks is also growing and it’s hard to keep up on the talent front to both defend and roll out new products. As a result, he thinks no-code will provide other CIOs with “Aha!” moments in the future.
“I agree with your observation—most of the CIOs I speak with, they’ve heard of no-code, but even at conferences, I’m not hearing a lot of talk about it,” they say. “But I feel like the world will have to come around to this because I think everyone is facing the same issues; no one has the magic bullet for how to keep the Java stack current relative to vulnerabilities.”
Let me end by saying that this is not an advertisement for Unqork—I was just chatting with a long-time source and they brought this project up; they had nothing bad to say about other providers and I have not spoken to Unqork for this column. I know Unqork well, but I also know that Genesis is doing some big things in the capital markets, as well. And I’m sure that there are other vendors in the space that are doing cool things that I have yet to be introduced to.
I am interested in the trend…vendors love to use the terms “no-code” and “low-code” in press releases, but it still feels like there’s a fair amount of skepticism out there. I trust this particular CIO’s opinion when it comes to tech advancements, so I’m buying in that we’re still on the ground floorwhen it comes to this kind of development model. But the future looks bright.
Download a free PDF version of the original article.
