It must truly be an exercise in collaboration in order to deliver productivity enhancements with any measure of ubiquity across the industry, especially among the industry's legacy system vendors. While this may seem obvious, it's a concept that eluded some of the most talented minds in the industry. This oversight was due in part to the lack of appreciation for the importance of these systems. For the longest time, many of the legacy vendors were seen as obstacles to progress and impediments to advancement. Legacy systems were viewed as a necessary evil for those with a desire to build an integrated solution.
Legacy systems serve a vital role in the landscape of advertising commerce.
Legacy systems touch every dollar of advertising expenditures that changes hands industrywide. The industry's pain of manual processing, human error, poor data integrity and insufficient transactional accountability is felt most severely in the areas where legacy systems don't communicate and information is trapped. It comes as no surprise then, that only a solution that involves and incorporates legacy systems can alleviate this pain. To exclude these systems from the solution isn't only to ignore one of the biggest problems in the industry. It actually creates more problems by adding new steps, new systems and new processes without replacing or streamlining old ones.