5 Reasons to Modernize a Legacy App That’s Working
One of the biggest challenges when deciding to modernize a legacy application is wondering exactly why you have to do it. What if it’s still working effectively and bringing in most of the existing revenue for your company? Like the old saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Unfortunately, organizations that neglect innovation are likely to get left being in today’s fast-moving and highly competitive technology industry.
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With this in mind, here are five specific, nuanced reasons you may want to modernize your legacy products to get ahead of the market.
1) Increase Revenue
Turning a legacy app into a modern, cloud-enabled solution could make the software more accessible to new businesses and markets that you may not have previously served. Your flexible deployment and support models can enable you to offer your product in market segments which were untapped. For example, cloud can enable you to go after customers who could not afford large, upfront hardware investments or lacking internal IT help. Just look at the example of Amazon AWS; they were able to tap into fast growing smaller software vendors and that needed flexible options for infrastructure and scaling purposes that were not previously offered in the market.
2) Reduce Maintenance and Operational Costs
“Legacy products can be much more expensive to maintain due to the hardware/infrastructure they run on.”
Legacy products can be much more expensive to maintain due to the hardware/infrastructure they run on, the potential for poor architecture (i.e. single tenant), the lack of reusability, and technical debt. By replatforming, moving to a multi-tenant architecture, and leveraging today’s tools and technology, you get more efficiencies and reduce operational and code maintenance costs.
3) Easier Integrations
Chances are, your current legacy products may not have been built for modern integrations over internet infrastructure. Lack of web-enabled APIs that allow your product to easily integrate with other software providers can be perceived as huge limitations by your prospective customers or even existing customers. Without them, your customers may be forced to build one-off integrations which could result in costly maintenance for you and your customers. Worst case scenario, your customers may decide your product isn’t worth the trouble and leave you for an easier, modern integration enabled product. With the current tools available today, replatforming your legacy product and taking advantage of the open ecosystem can differentiate you in the market, help you build new channel partners to help you go to market, and make implementations faster and less costly for your customers.
4) Leveraging Cloud
Application modernization isn’t just about the actual software. Instead, your customers could be so tired of maintaining legacy hardware that they’re ready to move into the cloud, even if your app isn’t. However, moving to the cloud isn’t always a simple lift and shift process. You have to redesign the platform for multi-tenant architecture to be able to take full advantage of cloud services, including lower cost storage options, elastic infrastructure, and scalability.
5) Improved User Experience (UX)
Perception is reality in the product marketplace. There is a definite culture in the tech world that believes emerging technologies are building on the past and improving on it. Your platform may be excellent, but some people will disregard it simply because they imagine something better must have come along or have seen a competitor’s product since the decade it was released. Modernization lets you capture the excitement of new technology.
Completing a major application project can be a burden, especially if your team has been in support mode for a while. Strategic consulting and third-party resources can simplify the process, and KMS Technology offers the expertise and dev teams needed to help you get ahead.
