The global market for application modernization is projected to reach $50,440 million by 2028. This is driven explicitly by the necessity for enterprises to deploy dynamic apps that stand out in the crowd for sustained success.

Despite this wide acceptance, many businesses continue to rely on traditional, monolithic, and legacy artifacts in their application portfolio. Embracing application modernization with advanced tools and technologies presents a transformative chance to revamp legacy software, add new capabilities, embrace digital transformation, and foster enterprise agility. By doing so, businesses can unlock benefits such as improved operational efficiency, reduced production costs, and elevated overall customer experience.

Application modernization can take many forms. For instance, a recent study revealed that an overwhelming 99% of enterprises have plans to enhance their IT skills and adjust their cloud strategy, with 97% already taking the lead by rethinking their modernization plans.

However, the idea of carrying out application modernization can prove daunting.

Why Is Application Modernization Difficult in Enterprises?

Navigating the application modernization trail successfully comes with its challenges, with 93% of IT leaders encountering hurdles during the process.

Here are the top challenges that most enterprises face in their modernization journey:

1. Lack of In-House Talent

Modernizing legacy applications, as previously mentioned, presents considerable challenges. It demands the expertise of highly experienced professionals with in-depth knowledge of new technology, modern architecture approaches, new development methods, cloud migration processes, and technical intricacies.

In essence, application modernization is a multi-step journey that requires careful and creative future-building, along with thoughtful and strategic present management. As such, investment in employee training and upskilling becomes critical to cultivate a pool of professionals well-versed in contemporary development methodologies and frameworks.

However, nearly one-third of respondents to a survey mentioned a lack of employee skills or training as a key factor in failed application modernization. Consequently, businesses may face the costly endeavor of recruiting skilled IT professionals to ensure successful app modernization. The competence of the team plays a pivotal role in the modernization process, and hiring the right experts can place significant pressure on the IT budget.

2. Constrained Collaboration Among Development Teams

Application modernization often requires the collaboration of multiple development teams, each with their specific expertise. This can be difficult to achieve, especially if the teams are located in different countries or time zones.

An Atlassian survey found that while 83% of the tech leaders affirmed the importance of effective interdepartmental communication, only 35% of them had prioritized investments in cross-collaboration.

How does this affect application modernization?

3. Legacy System Constraints

Modern software can be hindered by unwieldy legacy systems, posing challenges for modernization efforts. Updating and maintaining legacy code proves to be difficult, and even small modifications can render the large code base more susceptible to problems.

Additionally, legacy code exhibits tight coupling with other parts of the system, resulting in complex dependencies that are hard to disentangle. Consequently, developers may find it challenging to modernize specific components of the legacy system without impacting other interconnected parts.

The presence of these bulky legacy systems can cause a slowdown in modern software performance, leading to subpar results. This slowdown further compounds developers’ difficulties in updating individual components of the legacy system without causing disruptions to other system elements. Addressing these challenges becomes crucial to ensure the smooth and efficient modernization of software applications. This is one reason why migrations away from legacy applications is typically done over multiple stages. For significant portions of this journey, the legacy systems coexist with the emerging new applications. This strains the talent pipeline even more, because the enterprise needs to provision experts who can understand the old system, the new applications, and the slow and steady process of shifting from one to the other.

4. Data Integration

Legacy applications are often siloed, meaning that they store data in different formats and systems. This can make it difficult to integrate them with new applications and data sources.

For example, a legacy application for customer relationship management (CRM) might store customer data in a relational database, while a new application for marketing automation might store customer data in a NoSQL database.

To integrate these two applications, it would be necessary to convert the customer data from one format to another. This can be a complex and time-consuming process.

5. Financial Strain and Unpredictable Timelines in App Modernization

Despite the potential benefits of app modernization, the process itself can lead to financial strain. A survey indicated that 74% of U.S. developers reported an average modernization cost of approximately $1.5 million, subject to variations based on factors like users, infrastructure, application replacement, and IT training.

Additionally, numerous organizations face extended timelines for planning, development, testing, and deployment of their modernization projects. This undertaking demands significant utilization of both internal and third-party resources, resulting in extensive time commitments.

How Can i-Source Help Enterprises Address Application Modernization Challenges?

The most common challenges business owners face when modernizing legacy software are a lack of in-house expertise, a lack of collaboration among development teams, a dearth of innovative technological resources (like no-code applications), increased costs, and extended project timelines.

i-Source can help enterprises address application modernization challenges in the following ways:

At i-Source, we understand how complicated application modernization can get. Connect with us today for a consultation to learn how we can help you through this process.

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