One reason to have children is to create a new generation of people who haven’t heard your jokes yet. So maybe some of you haven’t heard the one about why it only took God six days to create the universe: He didn’t have an installed base. Hey-yo!
This recent article from CIO Dive attests that this perennial IT problem hasn’t gotten any easier since the first time I heard that joke sometime in the mid-1990s. In fact, things are getting more difficult as the pressure to adopt AI plays havoc with budgets and staff’s time commitments.
CIO Dive quotes Niel Nickolaisen of research firm IDC: “One of the things that slows down agility and creates friction is just the time and effort it takes to maintain legacy infrastructure, legacy workloads, that weren’t designed for this rapid pace of change.”
Plus ca change, as they say in Peotone.
This tension between the pressure to implement transformative technologies like AI, versus the need to maintain legacy technologies (or to make the right decisions about migrating away from them) is still a powerful force bedeviling enterprise communications/CX technology professionals. You may not want to spend a lot of time thinking about old technology, for both career and quality-of-life reasons, but the investment is huge, and in many cases the value provided by the old technology is still meaningful. But support costs, new security issues, and integration challenges all take their toll.
We’re hoping that our Enterprise Connect 2026 track, Legacy Unleashed: Optimizing Your Communications Backbone will offer IT pros a fresh perspective and useful information about dealing with the challenge of maintaining your legacy communications and CX systems. There’s still a need to provide optimal service and reliability, while continuing to find ways to reduce the cost of this ongoing maintenance (“do more with less” is another one of those timeless mandates).
We already have a number of sessions posted to our website Agenda for this track, with more to be added over the coming days and weeks. I’m especially excited about a session to be led by Swaraj Kankipati of The Hartford, on Reliability Engineering: When the Contact Center Can Never Go Down. Not only is Swaraj embedded in the task of maintaining reliability for a Fortune 200 insurance company, but the session title speaks to both the legacy nature of the challenge as well as how critical the task remains. Reliability is a fundamental principle to which communications systems have always been held, via the storied five-nines metric. Yet we live in a time when public cloud services have been known to suffer day-long outages (which would destroy your five-nines goal for the year), and in contact centers, that just can’t happen.
The ”Legacy Unleashed” track will also look at challenges around interoperability; market and technology trends for migrating legacy systems; budget control strategies; and more. It’s just one track in a program where much of the focus is on new technology and the future. But it’s a critical part of life for many if not most enterprise IT leaders and practitioners, and there will be plenty to talk about. I hope you can join us in Las Vegas March 10 – 12 for Enterprise Connect 2026!
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For over 35 years, Enterprise Connect has been the premier event where IT leaders, solution providers, and industry analysts come together to define the future of enterprise communications. As the most trusted conference in the industry, we deliver cutting-edge insights, world-class networking opportunities, and hands-on solutions that drive real business success.
Enterprise Connect is more than an event—it’s an experience that empowers enterprise communications leaders to reimagine the future of work. With elevated content, curated networking, and an engaging atmosphere, it remains the must-attend conference for professionals shaping the industry’s evolution.
Our mission is to equip you with the tools, strategies, and actionable insights needed to address your organization’s unique challenges. With industry transformation in mind, this year’s program introduces fresh new conference tracks, including:
- Legacy Unleashed: Optimizing Your Communications Backbone
- Workplace Reimagined: Engineering Tomorrow's Collaboration
- Tech Disruption Zone: Implementing Without Imploding
- Achieving Transformation: Architecting Your 3-5 Year Roadmap
- Future Shock: Communications Tech Beyond the Horizon
Featuring the most comprehensive program of objective content and an expansive vendor-neutral expo hall, Enterprise Connect is your ultimate resource for advancing collaboration, CX, and AV strategies. Join us to stay ahead, connect with industry trailblazers, and lead the transformation of enterprise communications.