Datacom and AWS expand partnership to help customers on their modernisation journey

Partnership now includes generative AI and agentic AI capabilities.

Australian MSP Datacom has expanded its partnership with AWS to include generative AI to streamline process and drive efficiencies, moving away from legacy technology.

As part of the agreement, Datacom is leveraging Amazon Q Developer, AWS’s generative AI-powered assistant, across 1,700 of its developers, to support cloud migration and modernisation processes for its customers

During at media roundtable at AWS Summit in Sydney, Mike Walls, director, cloud Datacom said their customers had problems around increased productivity and growth but were being held back by legacy technology.

He noted the way AI is becoming compelling and usable.

“The combination of those two things is a great time, given those customer themes are sitting there.

“We've now got the technology which is coming to fruition and enabling us to fast track and solve for a bunch of those problems, in terms of being able to modernise those legacy technology systems and provide modern digital platforms for customers much more effectively at the time,” he explained.

Datacom and AWS have been partners since 2013, but have now leveraged Amazon Q Developer, to help with its customers cloud migration and modernisation processes.

Walls said this expanded partnership has come at a good time as customers are “crying out for help” around modernising their legacy systems.

“A lot of the time, when you look at a lot of the applications and systems people have, they've been written quite a number of years ago. When you go to modernise them, this is stereotypical of IT projects often, is the person that wrote them doesn't exist anymore,” he explained.

“They're often not documented at all and so trying to come in and understand and unpick what that thing is to then actually modernise it is the biggest challenge.”

Walls noted that the modernisation piece can be done reasonably straightforward but it's understanding what it is first to then be able to transform it.

“If we look at what we can do with the tool sets and generative AI, we're using agentic AI to do all that documentation,” he said.

“Build agents who will now go through in a minute, so be able to understand the code of and legacy system, then document that in a form that we now understand, and then automatically document it into use cases to the feed the architecture and modernisation process to happen.

“That hasn't been there before, normally, you had to rely on an army of business analysts (BA) to do that, who have no context. If you use the AI systems in place now that can do that stuff in minutes and document it for you much more effectively, whereas that didn't exist before. It vastly reduces both the cost to do it, but also the time to do it,” he added.

Chris Casey, director of partners APJ at AWS said Datacom a strategic partner for AWS in Australia and New Zealand across both the commercial and public sector customer base.

“They're also a leading edge technology company who've been doing a lot of managed services for customers for many years. The ability for us to partner with them deeply on helping them, their developers and their technology teams leverage the latest technology through Amazon Q, and Amazon Transform are two of the big highlights,” he said.

“But also then help with the go-to-market aspect of what that means for our customers, in terms of the customers being able to migrate and modernise some of the legacy technology that they've been looking to leverage the cloud for quite some time, is an exciting milestone for us and the Datacom team.”

Through Datacom’s 1,700 developers using Amazon Q developer, Walls said the AWS technology is fast tracking their ability to do the job much more effectively.

“We're seeing 70 percent of code now being written through AI mechanisms. That is kind of saving 33 percent in terms of customer cost, in terms of how we do this type of stuff,” he said.

“That’s enabling us to not only modernise the movement of applications across, but also that mod piece, which is significant.”

Some of Datacom’s customers were using the same legacy application for the past 20 years and had multiple attempts and trying to modernise them to no avail.

Walls explained they used the AWS generative AI platform and were able to successfully modernise the legacy infrastructure.

“We've seen times from what typically would have been nine months of documentation time, down to hours of documentation time,” he explained.

“Then fast tracking of what would be like, often three to five year projects, and modernising very significant legacy applications done in 12 to 18 months max now is what we're looking to see come through. [There are] huge savings and opportunity from that perspective.”