Our founder and CEO, Slavik Zorin, has been a pioneer in legacy application modernization for 20 years. His approach to modernizations has been quite different from traditional modernizations. These excerpts expand on the concept of Modernization-as-a-Service (MaaS), introduced in part 1, and on the future of modernization.
The power of Modernization-as-a-Service (MaaS)
“The MaaS platform forms the ecosystem that enables all stakeholders to participate in the legacy modernization process in an open, transparent and collaborative manner. The ecosystem consists of three types of stakeholders. First are the suppliers of modernization tools and technologies who support and extend the technical platform in real-time and on-demand. Second are the providers of the modernization services, the system integrators, and professional services companies who use the MaaS platform to perform the necessary work of modernizing the legacy applications. Third are the consumers, who are the customers that own the legacy applications and who play an important role in areas such as quality assurance, review, and acceptance testing of the modernized applications.
MaaS is the game changer because it brings all stakeholders onto a single unified modernization platform that allows running not one, or two, but thousands of modernization projects at the same time. Today, companies who specialize in this field are capable of running only a handful of modernizations at a time within their specific niche. That makes them service companies, not software companies. Scaling a migration company from a one modernization at-a-time services company to thousand modernizations at-a-time software company is the vision behind MaaS.
Just think about it: MaaS revolutionizes today’s approach to legacy modernizations. It is the first collaborative modernization platform of its kind that creates a new industry and injects new life into the massive IT inventory of aging software systems. We have the necessary ingredients for it to work today: the bandwidth; the scalable cloud computing infrastructure that is 24 by 7; and the business imperatives of economizing and therefore, capitalizing on the massive investments already made in IT. MaaS brings it all together: the technology and the ecosystem which are the key ingredients for creating massive competitive advantage.”
The future of the legacy application modernization market is MaaS
“What I see is that there will be no such thing as application software that is left behind or lost to obsolescence. I see the future as a world without legacy applications.
The MaaS platform offers companies a continuous evolution for their application software. Once the platform and the ecosystem grow and become ubiquitous, companies will be empowered to modernize their applications frequently; similar to the frequency with which most homeowners renovate their homes compared to those who level and rebuild them ground-up.
My vision is that a world without legacy applications is one powered by a platform like MaaS that will become the springboard for industrialization of the current legacy modernization market. It is the vehicle that will transform the current market from small and fractured niches into a global industry.
Deliver a ubiquitous platform with a worldwide ecosystem supporting a) the entire lifecycle of legacy application modernization and b) the continuous evolution of legacy application software.”
This MaaS vision is the genesis of our Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP). It’s a MaaS platform that supports the entire modernization lifecycle—from analysis and planning to continuous transformation, build and deployment, to testing and production release—for all stakeholders.