David Jones expects to be able to phase out an ageing hodgepodge of legacy integration platforms and consolidate them on Workato’s enterprise iPaaS offering within a year.
The retailer has been running the legacy platforms and their siloed systems and data in parallel with the Workato platform since around October 2021.
It’s been keeping some systems active to support critical business functions, but senior technology manager Rahul Anhal told iTnews that phasing out the legacy systems and completing the consolidation is currently top priority.
“We are targeting in the next 12 months,” Anhal said.
“Consolidation is very key for us … because the more siloed systems you’ve got, the more siloed data you have.
“If we can move all our automation platforms into one and we can move all our integrations platform into one, then that provides us a good stepping stone to do the next big thing.”
The “next big thing” that Anhal refers to is the company’s agentic AI strategy.
The company is still doing proof-concept work examining the case for agentic AI applications but appetite for them coming from the company’s internal stakeholders is healthy.
The agents it has in its sights produce context-aware outputs that resemble reasoning and thought, but to do so they need to be able to access multiple data sources and platforms efficiently and securely.
For that, the retailer said it is considering the possibility of using a super-agent that could, for example, provide agent-to-agent communication between its Snowflake Cortex and Atlassian Rovo agents.
However, the 187-year-old company is grappling with a fragmented footprint of data silos and SaaS platforms that have accumulated organically, through a complicated recent history of acquisitions, mergers and demergers.
To address the problem, David Jones is gradually moving its legacy workloads to the new platform and has stopped using its legacy platform for any new digital projects.
Anhal was unable to reveal how many platforms it still needed phase out but described the number as “significant”.
“I can’t share the exact number, but it’s significant and it is running some critical integrations – especially between our retail management system and other ecommerce platforms.
“We are going to start lifting and shifting and transforming and, in that process, make the new platform work much harder,” Anhal said.