by Olman Quesada, on May 19, 2024 4:59:27 PM
As part of my daily activities, I have to talk to clients about modernizing their legacy software applications. In some cases, the client has divided opinions about what to do with their old applications, and in those situations, the discussion at the end focuses on determining if the legacy application should be modernized and how to proceed.
First, it’s important to determine if the application is crucial in the business operation. I can say by experience when clients come with applications where thousands of lines of code, hours, money, and knowledge have been invested through the years to make that exceptional (but old) piece of software, which is a critical revenue generating part of the business, it indicates that application or set of applications should be modernized.
Now, once the modernizing decision has been made, then you will need to determine how: you can replace it (using an existing app from another vendor), re-use it by just performing some minor adjustments to keep running the app for some additional time, rewrite it from scratch or transform the app by using a migrator tool.
Let’s analyze the last 2 options. Despite both following different paths, both of them end it up having a new application that will replace the legacy one. Choosing any of them depends on the availability of two critical commodities: time and money.
Typically migrating a VB6 application to .NET using our VBUC tool could take less amount of time than writing the application from scratch. Migrating the original application means that the significant time and money invested in the legacy application is not wasted as the wisdom enclosed in it will endure through a migrated one.
It is important to understand that transforming a legacy application implies extending the value of your investment by migrating such a set of applications to new platforms.
On the other hand, creating the application from zero means that you can decide what would be the new technology to support your software, and what are the new features to offer, and therefore it means a new investment and the deprecation of your past investments in the original software.
In GAP we can help you no matter which of these two options you decide our goal is to help you modernize a critical application that sustains your business operation for the upcoming future. Click below to learn more!
Olman Quesada is a veteran delivery manager at Growth Acceleration Partners and has been involved with dozens and dozens of code migrations.
