Your spaghetti code is past its expiration date. What to do when you needed to modernize yesterday.

As far as your users are concerned, the systems they’ve been using for the past 5 years work just fine. The IT department has managed to smooth over all the rough spots from your last acquisition/integration, and everyone knows how to handle the current bugs. But your vendor is about to end-of-life your HR application, and the tangled, prehistoric pile of Java code hiding behind every UI is growing bigger by the minute.

Just maintaining the “spaghetti factory” for 350 users and 150 different applications has become far too expensive. In fact, 20% of U.S. IT budgets are spent managing tech debt alone. Add to that the specialized knowledge and dedicated staffing required to keep the system usable, and it’s no surprise the IT ball is being dropped elsewhere. Things that could help your business gain a competitive advantage, like innovation, agility, and customer experience, are being neglected just to keep a sub-par status quo up and running. And IT isn’t the only department that’s paying the price for outdated, inflexible technology. Employees on the business side are hampered and frustrated by hard-wired workflows and kludgy, text-based interfaces that have zero mobility and no access to real-time data. Some departments still rely on manual and paper-based processes that cause errors, more frustration, and delay, not just for employees, but for partners and customers as well.

While high costs and inefficiency are big problems, they aren’t the most urgent. What keeps you up at night is the lack of security. Your enterprise was built before modern cybersecurity threats emerged and lacks basic security features like MFA and encryption. Outdated APIs and custom integrations create security gaps as well. With today’s rapidly evolving hacking techniques, your business is a sitting duck for data breach and other costly losses. You’re certain it’s just a matter of time before the unthinkable happens.

It may be too late for small fixes

According to Gartner, there are five main approaches to modernization: rehosting, replatforming, rearchitecting, rebuilding, and replacing. They all have their pluses and minuses, but a cursory analysis of your situation can help you quickly rule out what won’t work for you. For example, as we described in our “How to pick the right approach” blog, rehosting and replatforming provide the most superficial “fixes” and therefore are most effective for simpler systems that have fewer components and interdependencies. But for an old, outsized pile of spaghetti that’s rife with tech debt and complexity, quick fixes won’t address the issues that made modernization necessary in the first place–rearchitecting or rebuilding are the only answers.

You can explore the idea of rearchitecting or rebuilding a bit further by asking yourself some pertinent questions: How old are the most critical applications in your enterprise? Where is IT spending most of its time and resources? How long did it take to complete your last major integration? Is the technology itself the problem or is it just the functionality? If it’s “just” the functionality, how difficult is that to change?

According to Gartner, rearchitecting and rebuilding provide the most comprehensive modernization solutions, addressing all key aspects of a legacy system (technology, architecture, and functionality) and driving the most business value. Although, again according to Gartner, the cost and potential risk of these approaches is also the highest, using traditional methods of rebuilding.

Rebuilding is cheaper, faster, and less risky than it used to be

You know you need to rebuild, but how do you get it done fast while minimizing costs and risk? Traditionally, rebuilding an enterprise core system was a high-risk, high-cost endeavor. But with the right application modernization platform you can dramatically reduce the time it takes to build, modify, and deploy custom enterprise applications at scale. With Rappit Developer your team can move from concept to prototype instantly and automatically generate clean, best-practices-based Java code that can be extensively tailored outside the platform. This allows you to develop fully customized, cloud-native enterprise Java apps 4x faster than traditional methods, at as little as 25% of the cost – with no vendor lock-in.

No vendor lock-in is just one of the ways Rappit Developer mitigates the risks associated with rebuilding legacy applications. By allowing you to own the code, applications developed using Rappit Developer can be integrated with other systems without limitation to ensure future flexibility. Rappit Developer also supports a step-by-step approach to modernization in which new features are introduced gradually and run alongside existing systems during implementation to ensure continuity.

Case in point Solvay, an advanced materials and specialty chemical company, partnered with Rappit to redesign all of its 100 business applications on the Google Cloud Platform.
Freeing its enterprise from vendor lock-in allowed the company to integrate all its applications for the first time, across 24,500 employees and 62 countries. For Solvay, a fully integrated, cloud-native enterprise ensures centralized, best-practices-based application support and maintenance, and the ability to innovate with a consistently high standard of quality.

Optimized for cloud-native deployment, Rappit Developer-based applications lower costs and minimize risk by reducing physical infrastructure, system maintenance, and specialized IT staffing requirements. They also provide built-in security and reliability features, open APIs, and built-in connections to advanced technologies such as AI and data analytics. For fast-growing European lingerie retailer Hunkemoller, partnering with Rappit to rebuild their core legacy application on Google Cloud enabled them to quickly and cost-effectively create a future-proof retail environment for their 850 international stores that paid for itself in just one year of operation.

Leaving a legacy of business agility

Maybe your systems aren’t that old, and the pile of spaghetti isn’t that big, and the burden on IT is still manageable. But how long will that continue to be the case? Today, even the most clairvoyant business and IT managers are at a disadvantage if their enterprise is not inherently flexible. Regardless of how urgent your need for modernization is, now may be the perfect time to start planning your next move – before your systems become a liability.

The more time you have, the more options you have, and having a consultation with a Rappit expert can help you maximize both. With over 45 years’ experience building enterprise applications, and over 15 building for Google Cloud, Rappit can help you plan and execute the right strategy for transforming your enterprise into a modern, agile platform that empowers you and your company to outperform.

Contact us and learn how to start your modernization journey, the Rappit way.