In a survey conducted with 100 business and technology executives, 91% agreed that application modernization plays a critical role in an organization’s adaptability and ability to implement their digital transformation initiatives. Many of these organizations are still figuring out how best to modernize to meet their goals, some of which include the ability to reduce technical debt, increased product agility, reduced costs, and shortening time to market.

Application modernization has long been one of the initiatives that IT leaders saw as coming but not urgent. As we’ve talked about before, that urgency is now reaching a critical inflection point. For example, in the most recent survey of the top priorities for state government CIOs provided by NASCIO, legacy modernization is fifth on the list, and they believe it will continue to be a priority and receive heavy investment for the foreseeable future.

While the ability to get budgets secured is one of the big challenges in moving forward with modernization projects, between the necessity of digital transformation initiatives to provide customers with a good experience as well as the potential for security risks in old, outdated applications, IT departments now have significant ammunition to make a case for legacy modernization. In fact, the biggest challenge to application modernization is currently a lack of skills or expertise based on feedback from the above business and technology executives. Another issue they’ve raised is outdated processes and tools. EvolveWare’s Intellisys platform can help to minimize the impact of these issues.

While a lack of skills and expertise can apply at many levels of the process, the Intellisys platform helps to automate the understanding of legacy applications in cases where the lack of skills is related to legacy programming language knowledge or understanding of the rules in use. Using its patented technology in its extraction engine, Intellisys extracts metadata from source code for applications written in over 20 programming languages and generates a detailed and diverse set of documentation artifacts including an overview assessment report and several graphical representations of the code. It also converts this code into industry standard patterns that are turned into code representations that can be understood by any developer as well as business analysts. This reverse-engineering is automated to 100% and allows organizations to let go of manual processes and tools they may have used to understand applications in the past. Organizations are well-equipped to identify the level of technical debt they may have in their applications using the set of tools that Intellisys provides.

Once this foundational understanding has been created, Intellisys also enables its clients to choose between and implement two broad modernization paths–business rules extraction and automated code migration. This decision is made depending on the current state of the application versus the organization’s overall goals and needs. As has become evident, a “lift and shift” migration doesn’t fully allow organizations to optimize cost reductions desired by moving to the cloud as technical debt remains within the application and the new application is not architected in a way that fully takes advantage of the benefits of the cloud. Intellisys allows organizations to combat this both with features designed to optimize code before an automatic code migration as well as features that help automate the business rules extraction process for those who either wish to move their applications into standard COTS products or who wish to rewrite the application from scratch. Organizational leaders and executives are now well-aware of the need for application modernization as well as some of the challenges presented with traditional methods and processes of implementation. As they push forward in order to meet modernization goals, utilizing tools such as Intellisys will help ensure that their digital transformation objectives are met

To learn more about the application modernization process and options provided by Intellisys, please click here or contact us.