Legacy Technology: SSRS teaching new dogs old tricks.

Teaching New Dogs Old Tricks: Why Legacy Tech Still Matters

In software development, there’s always a rush toward the new. Cloud platforms, AI services, and the latest frameworks grab the headlines, and rightly so — they open up powerful possibilities for businesses. At Village, we encourage our developers to get hands-on with modern tools like Microsoft Synapse and Power BI because they’re shaping the future of data and enterprise applications. 

But here’s the reality: many businesses still rely on technology that’s been around for decades. And those systems matter. They run payrolls, manage stock, deliver reports to regulators, and underpin day-to-day decision making. That means if you’re going to be a truly effective enterprise developer, sometimes you need to be as comfortable with “old tech” as you are with the shiny new stack.

In the last couple of months, we have been writing business reports with SSRS, using XSLT (not even the latest tooling) to drive work instruction tickets, reverse engineering a VB6 picking ticket platform on a factory site. Even with moderner tech we are having to fire up old environments to nudge things back into secure versions. None of these are exactly fashionable, but they remain critical to the businesses that depend on them.

Why Does This Matter?

Legacy technologies survive because they work. They’re embedded into business processes, they’ve been customised over years, and in many cases the cost and risk of replacing them outweigh the benefits. That doesn’t mean businesses don’t want to innovate — they do — but innovation often has to be built on top of, or alongside, existing systems. I’ve always taken the view that caring for business software is like looking after cats, if you are always replacing cats with kittens you are not doing it right.

That’s why our developers don’t just chase the next framework release. We make sure our team understands how to keep older systems running, how to extend them safely, and how to bridge them with modern cloud platforms. Sometimes that means relying on the “old timers” who’ve been working with these tools for decades. Other times it means giving the “young guns” the confidence to step into unfamiliar territory and realise that these older tools aren’t scary — they’re just different. It does take a team to achieve this.

Bridging the Gap

In practice, this balance of old and new is where a lot of value lies. We might use Azure Data Factory to feed a modern analytics platform, but that platform could still be consuming data from an on-premises database where day to day reports are written in SSRS. We might build a new mobile app for a client, but the workflow behind it could be orchestrated by a legacy industrial application where SQL, or even a text report is our only access not some nicely written API.

And yes, even here in the office, some of us have had to relearn old tricks and we are teaching some of the new dogs old tricks as well.

The Takeaway

For developers and businesses alike, the lesson is simple: don’t dismiss the old tech. It’s part of the landscape, and learning how to work with it — respectfully and effectively — is often what makes projects succeed. At Village, we take pride in being fluent across generations of technology, so that whether you need a modern data warehouse in the cloud or a critical legacy system kept alive and integrated, we’ve got the skills and the mindset to deliver.

Because sometimes, you really do have to teach a new dog an old trick.

The team at Village are experts in Business Intelligence across various industries, get in touch to discuss your BI needs for your business today.