RetroBridge: Non‑invasive API virtualization for legacy ERPs
9/10
Demand Score
Teams cannot adopt new SaaS or partners due to legacy lock‑in and fragile point integrations causing outages.
8/10
Blue Ocean
Competition Level
$4k-18k
Price/Month
Predicted customer spend
12 days
Time to MVP
Difficulty: Hard
The Problem
A drop‑in integration fabric that exposes clean REST/GraphQL APIs and event streams from legacy ERPs (AS/400, Oracle EBS, Sage, custom COBOL) and connects them to modern SaaS without changing the lega
🔗 Validated by Real User Complaints
This problem has been verified through 2 real user complaints:
Competitor Landscape
- MuleSoft
- Dell Boomi
- Workato
- Celigo
- IBM App Connect
- Rocket Software (legacy tooling)
Must-Have Features for MVP
CDC agents for iSeries/DB2/Oracle/SQL Server
API virtualization layer (REST/GraphQL) with schema mapping
Event bus with durable queues and replay
Prebuilt adapters for EDI/AS2, SFTP, MQ, SOAP
Automated field mapping suggestions with ML and human approval
Idempotency, rate limiting, and backpressure controls
Data governance: PII masking, lineage, and audit logs
Rollback and blue/green cutovers for zero‑downtime go‑live
⚠️ Potential Challenges
- Access to legacy systems (AS/400 security, network whitelisting)
- CDC setup and log permission constraints
- Data quality and master‑data inconsistencies
- Throughput limits on legacy DBs
- Change management for deprecating old batch jobs
Risk Level: Moderate
🎯 Keys to Success
- Expose 80%+ of required legacy endpoints in <6 weeks
- Cut integration incident tickets by 60%+
- Reduce time to onboard a new SaaS from months to days
- Sustain <300ms p95 for common read APIs
- Zero unplanned downtime during migration windows
Ready to Build This?
This hard-difficulty project could be your next micro-SaaS success.