IBM today is announcing a significant milestone in how Blue Pearl is leveraging IBM Bob, an agentic AI-powered software development partner, to accelerate modernisation of their legacy Java codebase.
The agentic AI helps increase engineering productivity, strengthen security posture, and improve delivery timelines for clients navigating increasingly complex legacy systems.
Organisations across South Africa and the continent face mounting pressure to modernize ageing applications, while managing rising development costs and persistent skills shortages.
IBM Bob is helping enterprises shift from traditional AI-assisted coding to AI-assisted software delivery. The agentic AI-first development partner not only helps developers write code fast but also works across the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), from planning and coding to testing, deployment, and modernisation, with the governance and security controls enterprises need.
Blue Pearl, a cloud solutions and consulting services company, adopted IBM Bob to modernize components of its BlueApp platform strengthening the platform’s technical foundation and completing a full Java uplift approximately 90% faster.
By leveraging IBM Bob’s intelligent modernization capabilities, the company completed a Java upgrade project that would traditionally take approximately thirty (30) days in just three (3) days, preserving more than 160 engineering hours while achieving zero defects post-deployment.
Blue Pearl also reported approximately 15% faster response times across key workflows, while the move to a modern Long-Term Support baseline helped strengthen the platform’s overall security posture.
Modernisation has become a growing enterprise priority, with 60% to 80% of development budgets going to modernisation rather than net-new creation, while 75% of companies face skilled developer shortages, especially in Cobol and Java. Blue Pearl’s work with IBM Bob shows how agentic AI can help address this pressure by accelerating modernisation workflows with governance and security embedded from the outset.
“Modernising enterprise systems is not simply about rewriting code faster. It is about protecting business continuity while enabling innovation,” says Saireshan Govender, founder and CEO of Blue Pearl. “Working with IBM through IBM Bob enabled us to significantly accelerate modernization work across our platform while improving operational efficiency and maintaining the quality standards our customers expect. The results demonstrated measurable business value in both speed and engineering productivity.”
“Organizations today are balancing innovation demands with the realities of technical debt, security risk and limited development capacity,” says Ria Pinto, country GM and vice-president of technology at IBM South Africa. “IBM Bob was built to help enterprises modernise mission-critical systems faster and more responsibly by embedding AI across the entire software development lifecycle. Our work with Blue Pearl demonstrates how organisations can accelerate delivery timelines while maintaining governance, visibility and quality.”
IBM Bob expands the company’s vision from AI-assisted coding to AI-assisted delivery, enabling enterprises to orchestrate complete modernization and development workflows through AI agents. The platform combines multiple AI models, including Anthropic Claude, Mistral open-source models, and IBM Granite, alongside specialised fine-tuned models for code reasoning, security, and next-edit prediction, dynamically routing tasks based on performance, accuracy, and cost efficiency.
IBM Bob also introduces enterprise-grade security and governance capabilities directly into development workflows, including prompt normalisation, sensitive data scanning, real-time policy enforcement and AI red-teaming. This helps organisations proactively identify vulnerabilities earlier in the development process.
At IBM, more than 80 000 employees are already using Bob globally, with surveyed users self-reporting an average productivity gain of more than 45% across software development and modernization tasks.
IBM Bob is currently available as a SaaS offering with enterprise and individual plans, including a complimentary 30-day trial.
Featured picture: Ria Pinto and Saireshan Govender