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Legacy middleware costs compound
BizTalk and SAP PI carry rising licence, infrastructure, and specialist labour costs. The longer the platform stays, the smaller the talent pool that can keep it running safely.
Enterprise migration guide
Migrating to a modern integration platform? Here's the playbook.
Used by Nurminen Logistics, Fazer, and Prima Pet Premium. A practical framework for moving off legacy middleware without disrupting the business that depends on it.
43%
Operational efficiency gain
3–6mo
Typical time to ROI
75%
Lower TCO vs legacy middleware
The cost of standing still
Why most enterprises move off legacy middleware now
The trigger is rarely a single failure. It's the slow accumulation of cost, fragility, and risk that makes the current platform a tax on every other strategic project.
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The integration estate gets brittle
Years of point-to-point connections, undocumented orchestrations, and one-off fixes turn the platform into a fragile core that blocks every new business initiative.
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Vendor end-of-life dates are real
SAP PI/PO mainstream support ends in 2027. BizTalk 2020 is the last release. Waiting moves the migration from a planned programme to an emergency one.
Interactive tool
Find your migration strategy
Five questions. A personalised recommendation based on your portfolio size, team experience, and risk appetite — with a matching case study.
Question 1 of 5
How many integrations does your organisation currently run?
Select an option
Big bang migration
Single cutover event. Best for smaller portfolios with strong testing capability. Fast, but all-or-nothing.
Phased by domain
Move by business domain — CRM first, then ERP, then Finance. Cleaner risk control when domains have clear boundaries.
Phased by criticality
Start simple, build confidence. Low-risk integrations first — the team learns the platform before tackling mission-critical systems.
Interactive tool
Integration criticality matrix
Plot your integrations by business impact and technical complexity. The quadrant they land in determines their migration priority and wave sequence.
↑ Business impact
Quick winsWave 1
High impact · Low complexity
Customer data sync
Email notifications
Critical pathWave 2–3
High impact · High complexity
ERP order processing
Financial reporting
Easy pickingsWave 3–4
Low impact · Low complexity
Legacy file transfers
Defer or simplifyWave 4+
Low impact · High complexity
Custom connector (outdated)
Technical complexity →
Suggested migration sequence
Start with your 2 quick wins in Wave 1 — these deliver immediate value and build team confidence. Then plan extended parallel running for your 2 critical path integrations in Waves 2–3 with detailed rollback procedures. Evaluate the 1 lower-impact item for retirement before committing migration effort.
The four quadrants
How the matrix decides your wave plan
The quadrant an integration lands in answers two questions for you: when to migrate it, and how much rigour the migration needs.
Quick wins
Wave 1High business impact, low complexity. Migrate first to prove value and build team momentum on the platform.
Critical path
Waves 2–3High impact, high complexity. The integrations that run the business. Plan parallel running, detailed rollback, and dedicated cutover windows.
Easy pickings
Waves 3–4Low impact, low complexity. Bundle into batches once the team is fluent. Useful for newer engineers to learn on real work.
Defer or simplify
Wave 4+Low impact, high complexity. Strong candidates for retirement, consolidation, or replacement with a SaaS equivalent before any migration effort.
Interactive tool
Migration readiness checklist
Work through the five readiness dimensions before kick-off. Your score updates as you check items off, and the share link lets your team complete it together.
0%
Overall readiness score
Complete items to assess readiness
0 of 25 items complete
Real migrations
From spaghetti to clarity
Three organisations. Three different strategies. All moved off legacy platforms with no disruption to their operations.
Nurminen Logistics
From Microsoft BizTalk plus two other platforms
Big bang migration43%
Operational efficiency improvement
A 140-year-old Finnish freight forwarder running three integration platforms in parallel. No in-house integration resources and rising maintenance costs. They committed to a full migration to Frends and consolidated everything into one platform with no operational disruption.
Fazer
From SAP PI plus EDI tools and finance systems
Phased by domain3→1
Platforms consolidated
A €1.1B Nordic food company with eight countries and diverse business units, each with their own integration needs. SAP announcing PI/PO end-of-life forced their hand, and Fazer used it to modernise rather than just migrate.
Prima Pet Premium
Greenfield iPaaS adoption
Phased by criticalitySelf-sufficient
Team builds and maintains independently
A Finnish premium pet food manufacturer. Small IT team, no prior iPaaS experience, ERP operations that could not afford disruption. They started with a non-critical pilot to learn the platform before touching anything business-critical.
After migration
Migration is the starting line
Organisations that treat migration as the finish line watch their new platform drift into the same chaos they just escaped. Here's what the best ones do next.
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Governance without bureaucracy
Standards that enable speed. A living integration handbook — naming conventions, approved patterns, security requirements — that developers actually use because it makes their work easier.
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Enable, don't centralise
One central team doing all the work creates backlogs. A Center for Enablement publishes reusable templates and trains business units to build independently, scaling capacity without scaling headcount.
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Adopt AI strategically
Start with high-volume, low-risk use cases — invoice exception handling, ticket routing. Keep transparency and auditability. Pilot, learn, refine, then scale. Not everything needs AI, and not all at once.
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Monitor intelligently
Define normal baselines. Configure alerts that distinguish signal from noise. Build dashboards that show integration health in business terms, not just uptime percentages.
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Control technical debt
Schedule regular refactoring sprints before debt accumulates. Update deprecated connectors, consolidate redundant integrations, forecast capacity before it becomes an incident.
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Treat your vendor as a partner
Quarterly roadmap reviews, beta program access, active feedback to shape platform direction. The organisations that get the most value treat their iPaaS vendor as a strategic relationship, not a software purchase.
Coming soon
Hear from the teams who did it
Short conversations with the engineers and CIOs from Nurminen and other migrations on what they would do differently and what they got right.
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Ready to map out your migration?
Talk to a Frends migration specialist. We'll review your integration landscape, recommend a strategy, and scope what a migration to Frends actually looks like for your organisation.