Application Modernisation – Rewrite what’s necessary, but don’t necessarily rewrite!

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I’m in a very fortunate position to speak to lots of customers from various industries, across the UK, lately the conversations have been about application modernisation and the choices available to businesses. In this first in a series of blogs I want to share the options that IBM brings to organisations who are embarking on an application modernisation/business transformation journey.

Business pressures demand faster time to market and to application modernisation. Your existing estate determines the best approach to modernisation. Containers, Kubernetes, virtualisation and microservices are proven to deliver speed and simplicity, and are being adopted rapidly.

The initial forays for most enterprises are focused on the easy things. Moving basic applications to cloud infrastructure to cut costs, and building new applications on the cloud to speed innovation.

But to date, only about 10 to 20 percent of applications (let’s call this the easy stuff and is primarily a lift and shift) have moved to the cloud. The next 80 percent of the cloud opportunity (the hard stuff) focuses on shifting business applications to the cloud and optimizing everything from supply chains to sales transactions and this is where the hybrid approach is vital for businesses

Consequently many organisations are being advised to abandon their legacy applications and re-write as cloud native applications. There are other choices that need to be considered, before going down this particular route.

First of all this is not just a technology conversation, what about the investment in people and process that is associated with these legacy applications?

Secondly there sometimes exists a perception that a “2 world” environment should exist namely the old world (legacy) and the new world (cloud/cloud native). There is no need for this separation – a single environment should be the way forward as legacy and new are intrinsically linked especially in a hybrid world.

Gartner predicts that every dollar invested in digital business innovation through to the end of 2020, will require enterprises to spend at least 3x that to continuously modernize their legacy application portfolio. Spending that money effectively, will require business leaders to carefully select the right modernisation approach for their particular application.

Gartner goes on to say that 70% of private cloud adoption is being driven by modernisation and transformation, the factors behind this are bandwidth (latency) sensitivity of data, regulatory compliance requirements, security and performance.

So what is the IBM approach? By taking a step by step approach we can identify which applications can be kept, which you can migrate (to the cloud of your choice or remain on premise) and those that may need rewriting. This way we ensure you leverage the investments already made in skills, knowledge and technology, whilst benefiting from cloud in a quick and timely manner.

The journey starts with an inventory/discovery of your existing applications. From there, as the diagram shows, there are many paths to follow. IBM’s skills and experience in middleware provide unique insights and approaches to modernise your existing estate with speed, confidence, and reduced risk.

Read how Illmarinen modernised their applications with IBM Cloud Private https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/ilmarinen-icp and for more information visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud/application-modernization/

Coming up in blog 2, I will focus on IBM Transformation Advisor which is part of the IBM Cloud private (ICp) solution, and how it can rapidly help you along the application modernisation journey.