Legacy enterprise applications have run their course. Especially since the pandemic accelerated digitization, the need for organizations to modernize their apps has grown exponentially. So has the investment — the app modernization market is expected to reach $32 billion in the next three years.
If you’re contributing your pennies to the 32 billion, you would want to make sure you stretch it as far as possible. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can create a comprehensive, cost-efficient, future-proof, agile, Legacy app modernization strategy for your business.
Legacy Application modernization is the process of upgrading business applications to newer software development approaches, practices, programming languages, architectures, servers, etc.
The typical changes that occur during modernization are:
Legacy Application modernization delivers direct benefits to the bottomline by creating new revenue streams, efficiency, cost savings, competitive advantage and more. Here’s why you should consider modernizing your legacy apps today.
Across all industries, geographies, products, and customer groups, the world is going digital. From healthcare data to personalization on a streaming provider, modern technology powers critical business functions. Legacy technology can be a hindrance to your business catching up.
App modernization offers:
Customers today want to perform all their business transactions on their mobile phones. This makes building personal relationships with your customers that much more difficult. The only opportunity here is to create stellar customer experiences with:
The kind of infrastructure needed for processing the volume, variety, and velocity of data being generated today isn’t available on monolithic, on-prem technologies. If they do, they tend to be too expensive and inefficient to even consider. To scale effectively, you need legacy application modernization, that delivers:
Remote and hybrid work is the norm today. Your best talent might be situated across the globe. Enterprise software needs to support collaboration and co-working across this landscape.
App modernization enables organizations to:
If absolutely nothing at all, legacy app modernization makes your tech stack significantly more efficient. When you modernize, you can:
If you’re convinced, well, good start. Now, let’s get into what technologies and frameworks you need to modernize your apps effectively.
Technology foundations
of application modernization
There are hundreds of technologies you can use while modernizing your enterprise apps. Here, we discuss a few crucial categories.
The above are foundational technologies that define what the outcomes of your legacy app modernization efforts must look like. Low code platforms shape ‘how’ you do it—in an efficient, collaborative, cost-effective way.
Low code platforms give developers a visual way to write code for legacy app modernization. It allows them to drag-and-drop reusable components and write custom code on top of it, as needed. This approach enables you to:
WHAT ARE SOME
APP MODERNIZATION USE CASES?
Across industries, organizations, and functions, legacy app modernization delivers value across use cases. Some examples that we’ve seen work are as follows.
The IT teams at SVB chose WaveMaker for the rapid development of applications, creating a consistent visual framework to be replicated across all applications. They built a core shell consisting of database integration, secure API interfaces, and UI to be reused across applications. With that, they modernized several customer-facing, mission-critical applications. This resulted in:
Using low code, JJ Richards built new and diverse applications rapidly while integrating them with the existing DB schema leveraging REST APIs. Low code was also used to modernize existing applications using feature-rich and interactive user interfaces.
With WaveMaker, JJ Richards built 10 critical applications with just 7 developers within 18 months.
Etat De Genève adopted the WaveMaker application modernization platform to build various in-house applications that are made scalable and secure. While a few have already been built, the rest are being repurposed entirely with WaveMaker. OCSIN has been able to do this with minimal support and has for the most part used a self-service model.
With WaveMaker, Etat developed:
APP MODERNIZATION APPROACHES
Modernizing your app doesn’t mean junking your old and ringing in the new—well that’s one way to do it. But there are several others.
DESIGNING YOUR APP MODERNIZATION APPROACH
The approach you choose depends on several factors, such as the performance of an app, criticality to business, the effort needed to modernize, potential value if modernized, etc.
For instance, if you have a custom app for payroll or sales incentive management, you might want to replace it entirely with a SaaS tool. While these apps are important, they are not mission-critical and take away from your engineering team’s time. On the other hand, if you are a retail player and your e-commerce or logistics platform is on legacy application modernization software, you are losing out on the market opportunity. Modernizing this app is high-value.
To make the right decision, conduct a thorough assessment of your app landscape. Identify all the applications you have. Now, plot them on a matrix with the x-axis for effort/cost and the y-axis for potential value.
Depending on the complexity of your app and your organization, you’ll need a comprehensive plan. Here are some aspects to include in your enterprise application modernization plan.
Document the project scope clearly. If you’re modernizing an app for your own organization as an internal team, this is extremely critical to prevent being swayed in multiple directions while you’re in the middle of a sprint.
Given the scale of change, both technologically and culturally, executive buy-in is necessary, especially for budget approvals. Get onboard a champion, who will talk about the project in company forums, and socialize the application modernization initiative.
Put together the team that is going to implement this enterprise application modernization initiative. Traditional teams include UI designers, UX experts, UI developers, backend developers, database developers, mobile developers, quality analysts, DevOps, etc.
Based on your goals, design IT and business targets across key performance indicators. For instance, if your goal is to increase revenue, your IT KPIs would be number of new features launched, frequency of code releases, lead time for changes, etc. At the business level, you’d measure usage, incremental revenue, user growth, etc. Bring every stakeholder to the table to agree on the targets.
A good toolstack can do wonders for legacy app modernization. You can get a lot more done across project management, test automation, developer experience, CI/CD, etc. with the right tools. Most importantly, a robust low code platform can accelerate your legacy application modernization journey.
WaveMaker’s low code enterprise application modernization platform empowers you to transition to a composable architecture disruption-free. WaveMaker enables modernization across three levels of an application.
Modernize UI and create differentiated user experiences with existing assets. Use UI wrappers, connectors, themes, templates, custom prefabs and user journeys, to compose differentiated user experiences for your applications.
Create custom integrations with personalized API wrappers to create new app strategies on top of existing systems. Optimize the code output while keeping the original code intact.
Re-architect applications in a new, better ecosystem and containerized app delivery. Move to a cloud-native architecture with easier maintenance, dynamic scaling, and DevOps automation.
Across all levels, low code platforms can deliver enterprise application modernization outcomes quickly and effectively.
Modernize your legacy applications in phases. Roll out new functionalities built on low code as components and integrate them with existing systems. Enable co-existence of newly composed components with existing systems and phase out slowly.
Create an internal repository of core functional components using prefabs. Integrate new components into existing systems.
WaveMaker generates real editable code, empowering professional developers with custom coding to handle complex and edge cases.
Built-in capabilities such as Intellisense editor, API mocks, 1-click preview, automated mobile testing, inspection framework and debugging, can improve developer productivity and experience.
Maven-compliant applications with just a click to a cloud provider of choice without the setup hassles of CI/CD with WaveMaker.
The hype around generative AI has many people convinced that all coding is going to be done by the bot now. While this isn’t yet true, AI can do a lot for you. Choose a platform that integrates AI thoughtfully into your workflows. Some use cases that can put AI to work today are:
As you build and deploy microservices to the cloud, integrate monitoring tools to track app performance. Set up the infrastructure, tools, and automation you need to manage operations sustainably. Also regularly track your progress against the goals.
WaveMaker is a pro dev’s low code composable experience platform, purpose-built for enterprise-grade engineering. It is built from the ground up to empower developers with everything they need to build, test, and deploy exceptional products.
The composable low code platform enables you to modernize legacy applications component by component with zero disruption to your business.
With a flexible and reliable microservices-based foundation, the WaveMaker low code platform offers a host of modern front-end, backend, mobile, and DevOps technologies to deliver enterprise-grade cloud-native applications that deliver robust performance at scale. This includes:
Discover how WaveMaker can accelerate your legacy application modernization journey. Contact us for a demo or to discuss your specific needs with our expert team.
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