Across industries, organizations are facing a transformation that receives far less attention than cloud migration or AI adoption, yet may prove just as consequential: the retirement of the experts who built and maintained their most critical business systems.

For decades, core enterprise applications have been supported by highly experienced developers and architects whose knowledge extends far beyond programming languages or technical documentation. They understand how systems behave under pressure, why certain business rules exist, and how decades of operational decisions shaped today’s application landscape. In many organizations, that knowledge exists primarily in the minds of a small number of individuals now approaching retirement.

The systems they support, however, are not disappearing. Adabas & Natural applications continue to power essential operations across banking, insurance, government, manufacturing, and other industries. These platforms process millions of transactions every day while supporting business processes that evolve continuously alongside changing customer expectations and regulatory demands.

For organizations planning for the future, the challenge is no longer simply maintaining legacy systems. It is ensuring that the business knowledge embedded within those systems can be understood, supported, and extended by a new generation of developers—without introducing operational risk or overwhelming already stretched IT teams.

The Growing Risk of Knowledge Concentration

Many organizations eventually recognize the same pattern: critical expertise has become concentrated among a handful of long-serving employees.

These individuals often possess years of accumulated operational understanding that never made its way into formal documentation. They know which integrations are sensitive, which workflows contain hidden dependencies, and which business processes evolved through years of practical adaptation. Their expertise comes from experience rather than manuals.

At the same time, organizations are being asked to do more with fewer resources. Workloads continue to increase while internal IT teams remain under pressure to maintain daily operations, support modernization efforts, and respond quickly to business demands. As a result, there is rarely enough time available for structured mentoring, training, or knowledge transfer.

When this imbalance persists, organizations begin experiencing cascading operational risks. Development projects slow because fewer people understand application dependencies. Enhancements become harder to implement safely. Teams grow increasingly cautious around critical systems because confidence diminishes when only one or two people fully understand how applications behave.

Over time, even routine maintenance can become difficult.

Why Traditional Hiring Alone Isn’t Enough

Most organizations respond to generational change by trying to expand staffing before senior experts depart. Companies hire junior developers, increase contractor support, and invest in mainframe or Natural training programs for existing employees.

These efforts are necessary, but they rarely solve the entire problem.

Internal teams often lack the bandwidth required to mentor new hires while simultaneously managing production workloads. Recruiting experienced mainframe professionals has become increasingly difficult and expensive in a highly competitive talent market. Meanwhile, relying too heavily on individual experts creates dangerous single points of failure that only intensify over time.

Organizations that navigate generational change successfully approach it differently. Rather than treating it as a staffing challenge alone, they view it as a long-term capability and resilience initiative.

The most effective strategies combine people, processes, and technology to distribute knowledge more broadly across teams while building confidence systematically.

Strategies That Help Organizations Succeed

Organizations managing generational transition effectively tend to share several common practices.

Combining Internal and External Expertise

Many companies are supplementing internal teams with external specialists while simultaneously developing in-house capabilities. This approach allows organizations to maintain operational stability while accelerating knowledge transfer.

One Nordic financial services organization paired junior developers with retired experts serving as mentors. Structured training programs helped newer employees absorb both technical and operational knowledge more efficiently while reducing pressure on internal staff.

Replacing Informal Handoffs with Structured Programs

Ad-hoc onboarding processes rarely provide enough consistency for complex enterprise systems. Organizations increasingly rely on formal mentorship programs, rotational learning paths, and try-and-hire models that allow new developers to become familiar with systems before assuming full responsibility.

A Swiss manufacturing company used this approach to attract technology talent despite operating in a remote location. By integrating consultants into long-term mentoring programs, the company successfully transitioned several external specialists into permanent team members.

Modernizing Development Environments

Development tooling also plays a major role in reducing barriers for newer developers.

Modern environments such as NaturalONE and the upcoming Natural for Visual Studio Code help bridge the gap between traditional enterprise systems and contemporary development practices. Familiar interfaces, integrated workflows, and improved collaboration capabilities make it easier for developers to become productive quickly.

A U.S.-based manufacturer improved operational stability after adopting these modernized development tools, enabling experienced developers and newer hires to collaborate more effectively across teams.

Investing in Continuous Learning

Organizations are also expanding training beyond traditional classroom approaches. Virtual learning, hands-on mentoring, guided onboarding, and AI-assisted development tools are helping teams accelerate skill development while preserving operational continuity.

For example, a European insurance company maintained productivity during a platform rehosting initiative by combining structured technical support with long-term training and mentoring programs.

Capturing Institutional Knowledge

Perhaps most importantly, organizations are focusing on reducing reliance on undocumented tribal knowledge. Standardizing processes, documenting workflows, and embedding business logic into development practices all help ensure critical expertise remains accessible after experienced employees retire.

This shift transforms knowledge from an individual asset into an organizational capability.

How Modern Tools Are Changing the Transition Process

Technology is becoming an increasingly important part of managing generational change successfully.

Software AG’s modernization approach combines consulting, training, and development tooling to help organizations preserve knowledge while modernizing operational practices.

NaturalONE, the company’s Eclipse-based development environment, already provides capabilities that improve productivity and collaboration for Natural developers. Natural for Visual Studio Code, scheduled for release in 2026, is designed to make Natural development more familiar and accessible for developers entering enterprise IT environments today.

At the same time, Natural AI Code Assist is expected to further accelerate onboarding and learning by helping developers understand unfamiliar codebases, generate documentation, and reduce the time required to become productive within complex applications.

Together, these tools support a broader modernization strategy focused not only on technology, but also on long-term workforce sustainability.

Turning Generational Change Into an Opportunity

Generational transition does not have to threaten operational stability. In many cases, it can become an opportunity to modernize development practices, improve resilience, and distribute knowledge more effectively across teams.

Organizations that act early are often able to reduce operational risk significantly while making core applications more approachable for the next generation of developers.

The alternative is far riskier. Every retirement without a knowledge transfer plan increases the likelihood that critical operational insight disappears permanently.

As workloads continue growing and experienced experts leave the workforce, organizations must find sustainable ways to bridge past and future. Those that combine modern tooling, structured learning, and proactive succession planning will be best positioned to preserve the value embedded within their applications for years to come.

For decades, organizations running Adabas & Natural applications have relied on highly experienced developers who understand not only the technology, but also the business logic woven into mission-critical systems. As many of these specialists near retirement, companies are confronting a difficult reality: valuable operational knowledge may disappear faster than it can be replaced.

The challenge extends far beyond staffing shortages. In many enterprises, core applications have evolved continuously for twenty or thirty years, often with limited documentation. Senior developers carry deep institutional knowledge about workflows, compliance requirements, integrations, and edge cases that are rarely written down. When those individuals leave, organizations risk losing the insight needed to maintain stability and adapt systems to future business needs.

One Nordic financial institution recently experienced this transition firsthand. Two veteran developers responsible for a decades-old lending platform retired shortly after a new team was brought in to assume ownership of the application. Although the incoming developers understood the Natural programming language itself, they lacked visibility into the undocumented business rules embedded within the system. With tens of thousands of active loan agreements and billions of Euros tied to the platform, the organization faced a significant continuity risk.

This situation is becoming increasingly common across industries. Enterprises are now recognizing that modernization is not only about infrastructure upgrades or cloud migration. Just as important is ensuring that application knowledge survives generational turnover and remains accessible to future teams.

The Real Modernization Challenge

Natural remains a practical and approachable language for developers to learn. The greater obstacle is transferring decades of accumulated business understanding. In many environments, critical operational knowledge still resides primarily with a small group of long-serving employees. Once they retire, organizations can lose both technical expertise and the contextual understanding needed to make informed changes safely.

The issue becomes even more pronounced when development work is outsourced or distributed across external teams. Without experienced employees acting as translators between business requirements and technical implementation, organizations may struggle to maintain agility, deliver enhancements efficiently, or assess the impact of changes.

As a result, many companies are investing in structured knowledge-transfer strategies before retirement waves accelerate further. Some organizations retain former developers as part-time advisors or mentors, enabling newer teams to gain historical context directly from those who originally built the systems. Others are introducing formal onboarding programs and role-based training paths to shorten the learning curve for incoming developers.

Software AG supports these efforts through training and certification programs focused specifically on Adabas & Natural development. By creating repeatable learning frameworks, organizations can preserve institutional knowledge more effectively while reducing dependency on individual experts.

AI Is Changing How Knowledge Is Preserved

Artificial intelligence is also emerging as an important tool for organizations managing generational change.

Husbanken, the Norwegian state housing bank, explored AI-driven approaches to analyze legacy applications, automate documentation, and compare code structures across systems. These capabilities made it possible to expose information that had previously existed only in the experience of senior developers. Instead of relying solely on tribal knowledge, teams could generate structured insights directly from the applications themselves.

This represents a broader shift in how enterprises approach legacy modernization. AI-assisted tooling can accelerate onboarding, simplify code comprehension, and help teams understand complex dependencies that may otherwise take years to learn.

Modern Tools for a New Generation of Developers

To support this transition, development environments for Adabas & Natural are continuing to evolve.

Natural AI Code Assistant, expected in 2026, is designed to help teams interact more effectively with existing applications and documentation. The solution will enable developers to explore unfamiliar codebases, ask questions about system behavior, generate and validate code, and automate testing activities. These capabilities are particularly valuable when experienced team members are no longer available to provide guidance.

The platform is being developed for both cloud and on-premises environments, addressing the security, governance, and compliance requirements common among enterprise organizations.

Another major step forward is the planned release of Natural for Visual Studio Code in 2026. By bringing Natural development into the VS Code ecosystem, organizations can provide developers with an interface and workflow that align with modern engineering standards. Integration with DevOps tooling, alongside technologies such as COBOL, SSH, and JCL, helps simplify collaboration across mixed technology environments.

For new developers entering enterprise IT, familiar tooling can significantly reduce adoption barriers. It also supports geographically distributed teams by enabling modern source control practices, concurrent development workflows, and branching strategies.

Importantly, DevOps practices themselves can become a mechanism for preserving institutional knowledge. Automated testing, deployment pipelines, and version-controlled repositories embed business rules directly into development processes. Over time, critical expertise becomes documented within code, tests, and workflows rather than existing only in individual memory.

NaturalONE continues to play a key role in this modernization journey as well. Its Eclipse-based environment offers capabilities such as advanced debugging, code coverage analysis, and profiling tools that improve productivity and collaboration. Organizations like the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles have already used NaturalONE to modernize development processes while maintaining the reliability required for systems that handle millions of transactions each year.

Why Development Modernization Matters

Modernizing development practices delivers benefits that extend beyond technical maintenance. Organizations gain greater flexibility when implementing business changes, improve delivery speed, and establish a stronger foundation for DevOps adoption. These improvements help IT teams respond more quickly to evolving customer expectations and regulatory demands without compromising the stability of core systems.

However, modernization initiatives are most successful when approached strategically. Partial adoption often creates fragmented workflows and additional complexity. Organizations that see the strongest results are typically those that align new tooling, training, and operational changes under a clear long-term modernization strategy.

Preparing for the Future

The future of Adabas & Natural development is increasingly aligned with broader industry expectations. The introduction of AI-assisted tooling and support for Visual Studio Code reflects a clear focus on accessibility, productivity, and long-term sustainability.

Organizations that act early to preserve institutional knowledge will be far better positioned to manage workforce transitions successfully. By combining modern development tools, structured learning programs, and proactive succession planning, enterprises can protect the business logic embedded within their applications while preparing a new generation of developers to carry these systems forward.

The retirement of experienced developers does not have to mean the loss of decades of operational expertise. With the right modernization strategy, organizations can transform legacy knowledge into a durable asset that continues delivering value well into the future.