AI is making legacy system migrations faster and cheaper, turning decade-long projects into rapid pilots. Jason M. Lemkin points to Lightfield, a CRM startup offering free migrations and even a free Mac Mini to customers, a service that would have been impossible a year ago.
to your point, everybody always thought you get what you pay for. But in this world, no, there's modern people who it's a new market. Everything is greenfield for them. And they're like, this price helps them get into there. The other thing that's changing is imagine in the old world, if you spent a lot of time building around SAP or something of those sorts, to migrate from SAP to SAP is like a decade-long journey, right? The other thing, and that's being, uh, considered, The other thing that AI has normalized is the speed of migrations and the cost of— the speed has gone up and the cost has gone down, right? Because you can now use, you know, AI to understand the existing environment, map it, and lift and shift. We see that in Databricks is the number of data, like legacy data warehouse migrations we can do. So if your cost of migrating has gone down, your willingness to give a try on a new vendor and pilot it has also gone up. So I think that's why I think it's hard for monopolies to remain because many people can get traction fast. Just, take a look at how many of the people you have here that didn't exist a year ago. And now the revenue that they have is non-trivial revenue because people are willing to give it a try and to kind of migrate off of it, I think. And not all of them will make it, but there's definitely more of a willingness to try new software in this composable web, which I think is interesting.
Well, I want to, before we go into that topic, because it was on our list to talk about before, I want to talk about this Elm migration because people talk about it on X, but it's actually, you're right, living it, it's really important. I mean, for an extreme example, These guys at Lightfield here, next generation CRM, they have Mac Minis there and they will migrate you on site. Yeah, your CRM on site. Now, I don't know how many people have done it, but they will do it for you and they will give you the Mac Mini for free. I don't think a year ago that was possible.
