Message from CEO

We now live in one of the most transformational periods in human history, and every facet of our life is undergoing exponential change. Enterprises are struggling to deal with the dual challenges of business model disruption, and technology disruption. Perhaps the impact of this disruption is most acutely felt by the software industry, due to its inherent vulnerability to innovation and technology changes. Thanks to a perfect storm of technology and business model disruption, there is intense pressure on software businesses to modernize their traditional products and services. Multiple forces are driving the demand for modernization of software products, which can be broadly categorized as follows:

• Unprecedented consumerization of IT, and demand from enterprises to embrace their digital journeys, and deliver amazing user experiences
• Demand to support anywhere, any-time, any-device access and availability with the right performance, security, and scalability
• Changing business models demanding a commensurate change in supporting technologies, software and services
• Emergence of new technology and architectural paradigms to support needs of the digital era

Software landscape is dotted with tens of thousands of traditional products, which still run on legacy technology stacks such as Power Builder, Progress, Delphi, FoxPro, COBOL and VB etc. Often, these products have a monolithic and tightly coupled architecture, making them very difficult to maintain and support. Very often it is also the case that these legacy products cannot support the current needs in terms of transaction-speed, event processing, and real-time data handling.

Modernization is not just moving from a legacy technology to a new stack, but it’s also about modernizing applications for the digital era.

• Traditional to Digital-Native: Traditional, standalone applications are becoming obsolete, and are getting rebuilt and replaced with digital-native applications.
• On-premise to SaaS: On-premise installations are being replaced with SaaS and cloud-ready applications using leading-edge services such as MS Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
• Monolithic to Microservices: Monolithic architectures and legacy technologies are giving way to micro-services and API-based architectures, and newer technology stacks such as: .Net, Java, Java Script, LAMP and MEAN.
• Products to Platforms: Isolated products are being replaced by a platform of products and services, where configurability, integrations, and functional richness to support multiple business processes, are key product considerations.

coMakeIT’s Technology Modernization services are designed to help you navigate this maze, make the right technology, architecture, deployment choices, and execute the appropriate modernization strategy. Choice of technology modernization strategy will depend upon multiple factors, such as:

• current software stack and application architecture
• target architecture and technology frameworks
• hosting environment
• resource availability
• time frame and cost

After making a thorough assessment of the current status, future needs, and also considering factors such as complexity, risk, and business need, an appropriate modernization strategy must be chosen, and some of the possible options are:

Using this modernization strategy, the underlying core business logic and data are left undisturbed, and the legacy application is re-deployed without any major changes, to a different hardware/software platform. In this option, usually, the middleware, database, OS and hardware are replaced, and this is often viewed as an intermediate step in the modernization roadmap.

In this option, internally the software is improved, while keeping the external behaviour unchanged. Usually in a refactoring exercise, the focus is on simplifying the code to make it more maintainable, and this usually tends to be a low-risk option.

In this option also known as re-engineering, fundamental changes are made to the code; parts of the existing system or application may be reused, while other parts are added, or substantially modified to create a more robust and easier to maintain application. This typically calls for major redesign of the application architecture, tends to be more expensive and riskier than re-factoring, and could involve methods such as porting and migration.

The complexity of transforming traditional software into cloud-ready applications will vary a great deal based upon factors such as the current software stack and application architecture, target architecture and technology stack, choice of deployment models, resource availability, time, and cost. Based on these factors, one must choose the appropriate cloud transformation strategy, which could vary from low-complexity options such as re-hosting or re-factoring to high-complexity options such as re-architecting and replacing.

If one can afford, this is perhaps the easiest option to implement and legacy software is replaced with off-the shelf commercially available products, if they serve the business needs.

This is perhaps the most radical, high-risk, and expensive modernization option. If the effort involved and complexity in transforming the legacy application is far more than what is entailed in building a new digital-native application, and when the potential rewards outweigh the costs and risks, then this could be the preferred modernization option.