When operations stall at 30,000 feet, it’s rarely the plane’s fault. It’s the tower.

Earlier this year, radar failures at Newark Liberty International Airport grounded flights across the United States, not because the aircraft failed but because coordination broke down. A combination of aging systems, staff shortages and manual overrides created a chain reaction that left passengers stranded and schedules in chaos.

Enterprise IT isn’t so different. Cloud systems, data platforms, ERP modernizations and AI pilots are all taking off, but the control layer that’s supposed to orchestrate them is often still stuck on the ground.

When the automation “tower” fails, everything stops.

Who’s guiding your IT traffic?

CIOs and CTOs are moving fast. They’re focused on cloud-first, generative and agentic AI and workflow automation. Under all that progress is a quiet problem: The automation architecture powering it all hasn’t kept up.

Companies are building smarter systems but still relying on old job schedulers and hard-coded scripts to orchestrate between them. That creates delays, disconnects and blind spots. The sky might look clear now, but storms are coming.

The more systems you modernize, the more complex your operations become. And as this modernization goes faster and faster over time, the harder it is to coordinate workloads with high fidelity, especially across legacy systems that require custom-coded connectors, manual refactoring for continuous integration and automation designed for a different era. While it feels like you’re accelerating, legacy systems beneath the surface are quietly pulling the brakes.

Modernization without orchestration is like asking your control tower to manage new aircraft using equipment they’ve never trained on. The sky is getting more crowded, but the systems guiding the traffic are stuck in the past.

The illusion of progress

The problem with mainframes didn’t begin and end in the early 2000s. It lingered for decades. Even as businesses moved to the cloud in the 2010s, their most critical workloads and data remained locked inside monolithic, closed mainframe applications with no APIs, no agility and shrinking pools of technical talent.

During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, the issue broke into public view when multiple U.S. states issued emergency calls for COBOL programmers to stabilize aging unemployment systems. Rather than isolated IT issues, these were architectural bottlenecks that made rapid response impossible. No DevOps, no iterative improvement, no access to real-time data. Just batch cycles, manual updates and fragile processes buried under decades of technical debt.

Today, many enterprises are facing the same limitations, just in a different disguise. Legacy job schedulers and automation tools are the modern mainframe, standing in the way of AI adoption, API-driven integration and autonomous orchestration across cloud-native ecosystems.

These schedulers were designed for predictable workflows and tightly coupled environments, not for hybrid cloud, continuous delivery and interconnected platforms like SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), Salesforce and Snowflake. As a result, they can’t scale, they can’t adapt and they certainly can’t keep pace with AI-driven transformation.

Static scheduling vs. intelligent orchestration

Orchestration requires controlling systems with precision and context, rather than just connecting them. That’s where event-based architecture becomes critical.

Unlike traditional scheduling, which runs on fixed times or batch jobs, event-driven orchestration allows your processes to respond dynamically to business and system events. You react to what’s happening now, not just what’s scheduled. Orders get fulfilled the moment inventory updates. Reports run the second data hits the warehouse. Downtime shrinks. You meet service-level agreements (SLAs).

At Redwood Software, we call this architecture an automation fabric: a unified layer that weaves together cloud and on-premises systems and AI innovation with full visibility, scalability and control. What makes it different?

• Built for hybrid: Connect SAP, Oracle, cloud services and custom apps across environments.
• Agentless integration: Connect systems without installing or maintaining local agents, so no need for custom scripts. Reduce risk, friction and security vulnerabilities.
• AI-powered observability: Identify SLA risks and optimize performance before problems arise.
• Unified monitoring: View everything through a single pane of glass.

Why would you custom-code or patch together manual workflows when intelligent orchestration can adapt autonomously?

Avoid a Newark moment: Your flight plan

Let’s say your global energy company is modernizing for sustainability and scale. You’re juggling regulatory demands, transitioning to RISE with SAP, piloting AI in financial planning and managing dozens of custom systems. But your core automation is still dependent on a legacy scheduler designed for batch processing and nightly jobs.

You’re not alone.

This is where modernization breaks down. It’s not in the cloud migration or the AI launch, but in what keeps it all together. By upgrading to a modern orchestration platform, your company could retire fragile custom scripts, slash risk across compliance-heavy processes and move faster with fewer people.

Rather than just picking a tool, it’s essential to choose a partner with a forward-looking vision. RunMyJobs by Redwood is designed to be air traffic control for the modern enterprise. Even if you’re not feeling the turbulence yet, the future is coming faster than you think. 

Don’t wait until delays, outages or compliance gaps force your hand. Modern orchestration isn’t optional — it’s foundational.

See it in practice: Read our guide to learn how automation fabrics are helping teams orchestrate SAP and non-SAP data across industries.