India, April 27 -- Many companies are still running systems that were built ten years ago. These monolithic applications were crafted to manage everything from one place. In the beginning, that made sense. Centralized control implied stability and predictability. But over time, the same design that made things manageable started getting in the way. A small change to one part of the system would trigger testing across the whole system. Weeks would pass. Teams were spending most of their energy keeping the lights on rather than building anything new.

This is a bigger problem than most companies admit. Research by Pegasystems and Savanta puts the annual cost of legacy technology at nearly $370 million per business, factoring in lost product...