If you don’t modernize now, you’re out!

In 2023, the Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey results showed that 46% of the organizations would increase spend on application modernization. Besides that, 47% indicated to decrease investments in legacy infrastructure and data center technologies. This clearly illustrates the transition to modern technology platforms. This trend is driven by the need for applications to keep their business fit, innovation support and stay secure and compliant.

Strategies for application modernization

For some time now, organizations have used 5 well-known application modernization strategies:

• Rehost: sometimes referred to as lift-and-shift. No code changes required, apps are transitioned as-is to a new environment.
• Replatform: minor code changes so apps can be used with cloud technologies.
• Rearchitect: application functionality and code get modified and extended to scale better in the cloud.
• Rebuild: rebuild the existing app to make better use of cloud solutions.
• Replace: replace the entire app with a ready-made solution.

These are well-known strategies. More information about the impact and how to decide which strategy to choose, can be found here.

Every single one of these strategies come with their own set of risks and challenges. But one thing is for sure: rehosting an application takes significant less time than rearchitecting or rebuilding one. So speed is one of the most important reasons businesses choose rehosting or replatforming over one of the other strategies. Unfortunately, even rehosting or replatforming applications can take months. Generally speaking, application modernization projects are lengthy and costly. Besides that, technical factors as well as a skills gap play a big role. The question is, will an emerging technology such as AI solve this problem?

The impact of AI on application modernization

When asked this question, Serge van Namen, CTO at SUE, said: “I strongly believe in the possibilities of AI and especially in the of area of applied LLMs. Our engineers often use AI to support their engineering process for debugging and rudimentary code generation. Because of what we saw that AI is capable of, it can be an extension of the brain of an engineer in general and automate various aspects of their day to day job. Will AI solve all our problems? No, probably not. But it will surely have a profound impact on the speed and complexity of application modernization.”

Many experts are seeing the same development. IBM for example, mentions use cases such as application assessments, modernization planning, and automated deployment by generating CI/CD pipelines that are context-aware. Besides IBM, Gartner also mentions legacy code modernization as a practical use of generative AI in this article. And to top it all off, Forbes talks about using AI to refactor a monolithic app into microservices during modernization.

If you don’t modernize now, you’re out

Application modernization is already a hot topic in the industry. From the second an application is built, it deteriorates. Many companies struggle with legacy systems that hold back innovation, responding to market demands, and are increasingly costly and suffer from a lack of security and compliance. Other companies want to modernize, but don’t have the skills in-house to do so. But since modernization is becoming mainstream, it’s a safe bet that you’re competitor is already modernizing. And with the possibilities of AI, they will speed up. If you don’t modernize now and still accept a legacy situation, you’ll soon be chasing your competitors taillights. As already mentioned, it’s crucial to decide on a migration and modernization approach that fits your business needs, starting with defining what drives your modernization project.

Conclusion

We believe that AI certainly has a major impact on application modernization projects. However, it is important to make sure that the outcomes of AI-driven automations are still controlled and verified by humans. Not everything can be done by AI (yet). At this time, we see the most impact of AI on cloud migration strategies such as rehosting or replatforming. 

Would you like to know more about the use of AI in application modernization projects? You are more than welcome to join us on November 7th at our monthly where we will talk about how to use AI in application modernization projects.