Unlocking Business Growth Through Software Modernization

Technology leaders today face a defining challenge: balancing innovation with the burden of legacy systems. With nearly half of CIOs and technology executives prioritizing enterprise application modernization, the mandate is clear—transform to compete, scale, and secure your technology investments.

Generative AI (GenAI) is sparking increased interest in software modernization due to its potential to automate tasks, reduce costs, and accelerate the process of modernizing legacy applications, making it easier and faster to integrate with modern technologies.

Why Modernization Matters

Outdated technology slows progress. It limits growth, creates inefficiencies, and exposes organizations to risk. Modernization isn’t just about upgrading systems—it’s about unlocking new possibilities. Companies that take a strategic approach to modernization move faster, reduce complexity, and build resilience. The result? Greater agility, stronger security, and the ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities instead of chasing them.

Accelerate Market Growth

Monolithic architectures slow time-to-market, making it difficult to activate new use cases and capture emerging opportunities. Modern, flexible platforms enable faster iteration and improved scalability.

Reduce Technical Debt and Complexity

Software sprawl and legacy codebases can lock up 20-40% of a company’s technology value. Consolidation and modernization reduce tech debt and reclaim that value.

47% of respondents to Gartner’s latest CIO and Technology Executive Survey selected “integrate, innovate, and modernize enterprise applications” as a focus for the next year, the third highest priority overall.

Strengthen Security and Resilience

With 84% of codebases containing vulnerabilities, relying on outdated technology is a risk organizations can’t afford. Modernization ensures secure, compliant, and resilient software supply chains.

The Business Impact

Modernization isn’t just an IT initiative—it’s a business growth strategy. The right technology foundation enables companies to scale, reduce costs, and deliver better experiences. By investing in modernization, organizations can drive revenue, improve efficiency, and empower their teams to innovate faster. The impact goes beyond technology—it’s about building a business that’s ready for what’s next.

Boost Revenue: Scale operations, support larger customers, and create new revenue streams with a modern software platform.

Cut Costs: Optimize cloud spend and reduce ongoing maintenance costs by adopting a scalable, efficient architecture.

Enhance Features: Leverage modern technology stacks to improve system capabilities and create a better user experience.

Empower Developers: Equip teams with modern tools and architectures that drive innovation, automation and developer productivity, ultimately leading to improved developer experience (DevEx).

Create Value: Increase a portfolio company’s attractiveness to potential buyers, leading to higher valuation at exit and ultimately, higher returns for private equity firms.

Acquire and Retain Talent: Make it easier to attract and retain skilled developers who have the skills for and want to work with modern technology stacks as the skills to keep legacy technologies running are difficult to find and the people familiar with COBOL and other older programming languages are aging out.

Increase Agility: Allows for faster development cycles, easier integration of new technologies, and quicker adaptation to changing business needs.

Putting it into action

We partner with our clients to modernize their custom software footprint—whether defining a modernization strategy and plan, rationalizing and decomposing applications, or executing iterative modernization build sprints. We build together, bringing deep technical expertise, industry knowledge, and a collaborative approach to ensure long-term success. We bring a variety of GenAI accelerators to modernization initiatives, each playing an important role at key moments in the product lifecycle whether during the modernization strategy and planning phase, or during modernization build sprints. Together, we’ve:

• Designed a microservices architecture to replace a decades-old COBOL system, unlocking agility and innovation
• Converted a large .NET MVC codebase to .NET Core and Angular, streamlining functionality and UX
• Re-platformed a large insurance provider’s legacy application stack to a modern, cloud-first platform, integrating five legacy apps into one
• Enhanced billing and subscription platforms by centralizing business logic and improving API performance
• Delivered a modernized iOS app and Apple TV experience, ensuring seamless adoption for millions of users
• Rationalized a community bank’s application portfolio, identifying initiatives that would drive a 15% reduction in IT spend while retiring 6 mid-tier applications

Authors: Kaumil Dalal and Chris Miller