Goliath wins? This new intelligence gives giants start-up speed
Start-ups aiming to disrupt industry giants are facing a new obstacle: incumbents that understand their code as deeply as nimble challengers.
Historically, big companies have been weighed down by decades of accumulated code. Fixing a problem or rolling out a new feature couldn't be done without months of manual code discovery. Wrong turns and dead ends in software development were just accepted as the cost of doing business, even as the business lost market share to new entrants.
But now, the emergence of 'Software Intelligence' (SI) technology is turning big company's labyrinths of black boxes crystal clear, enabling CIOs, architects, and developers to cut those months of work to minutes.
Like military intelligence surveying a battlefield, Software Intelligence approaches code as territory to be mapped and navigated. Scanning the source code of one application — or even thousands across an IT portfolio — SI generates 3D maps and dashboards in seconds, revealing the facts on the digital ground.
That on-premise code that won't work in the cloud? It's pinpointed, along with the route around it. A mountain of technical debt you can't climb? Broken down by the number of hours to fix each flaw and ranked by 'bang for the buck'. A new security crack opening in the open-source code? It's automatically surfaced without having to distract busy developers.
The impact is profound.
'Imagine you're captaining a ship in the year 1500,' says Greg Rivera, product manager at CAST, a software mapping and intelligence company. 'You don't know what's on the other side of the ocean you're trying to cross. You may not even know if you're sailing in circles. One day, you're handed satellite photos, step-by-step routes, and a GPS showing you where you are. That's the level of change happening in IT.'
And since companies live and die by how fast their IT can move, SI is becoming a CEO imperative and a boardroom topic. 'When you can finally see the pathway, you can finally run down it,' says Rivera.
Software Intelligence's insights are instant, but getting to this point has taken more than 25 years of collecting data on how companies build, rebuild, and change their software. CAST has analyzed over a hundred billion lines of code to uncover more than 50,000 repeated patterns.
AI Enters the Chat
Humans are the first consumers of Software Intelligence, but they're not the only ones hungry for insights. Right now, CIOs use SI to gain control over their sprawling portfolios, reduce risks, and make fact-based decisions – for instance, when prioritizing which applications to modernize. Architects meanwhile use SI to navigate inside individual applications to avoid wrong turns during modernization.
But AI wants to know these things too. Why? Because while AI is great at writing new code, it can't modernize an existing codebase until it first knows how it's constructed. All its elements, interactions, and dependencies across applications must be mapped. Since 80% of developer work takes place on existing code, connecting SI's insights to AI's abilities has become an industry necessity.
Applying this approach, insurance and risk management giant Marsh McLennan prompted their AI with insights extracted from SI's examination of their code. The idea was to see if a giant codebase could then be modernized at AI-speed.
It could.
'CAST went line-by-line across the technology stack of several of our applications, distilling their objects and dependencies,' said Paul Beswick, Global CIO and COO at Marsh McLennan. 'This information was then used by the AI to fix issues and reduce the technical debt in the software. Hundreds of objects requiring coding changes were remediated, and a process that could have taken a few months was cut to a few minutes.'
Giants aren't the only ones moving faster. Start-ups can benefit from this too. 'Vibe-coding is making it easier than ever for a company to advance from zero to one,' says Rivera. 'But the codebase that gets you to 'one' is built with speed in mind, resulting in a lot of tech debt. Most of that needs to be rearchitected for a company to reach the next level: scale.'
Vibe coders are going to need their own map, too — to take on Goliath.
Learn more about Software Intelligence here.
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