Your privacy matters. We’ve updated our policies effective March 24, 2026.

LEARN MORE

What are legacy applications? Definition & guide

Our business is the modernization of legacy applications, and we talk about it a lot. Recently, Kathy Bazinet, an IBM Software Technical Sales leader, reached out to us on Twitter and asked:

“I would be really interested in your definition of “legacy applications”. Are you referring to monolithic Java or to COBOL or even something else?”

We thought this was a great question and wanted to share our definition with a broader audience.

How we define legacy applications

You can have a monolithic application written in a modern programming language or environment. Adjectives like “monolithic” or “fat-client” describes how the application is architected. You could argue whether or not a monolithic architecture makes an application legacy.

To us, an application becomes a legacy when what is under the application “layer” — be it a software library or framework, a programming language, or a database — goes out of style or worse, is no longer supported.

Today applications can experience such fate rather quickly. For example, Angular/JS is a modern-day SPA framework from Google that is quite popular. But that technology is now obsolete and has been replaced by another version of that framework renamed to Angular (dropping the JS part). While similar in name, applications are developed quite differently with it. So, a “modern-day” web application developed using Angular/JS is now considered a legacy application.

You can consider a programming language such as PHP to be a legacy web development language as well. Any web applications built with PHP are arguable legacy. Therefore, it’s not only monolithic mainframe or fat-client desktop applications that are legacy. Anytime a software environment or language is no longer supported by its vendor or loses its following, all applications built with it turn into legacy.

Tech debt, therefore, is literally the “drag” that antiquated software platform imparts on its host applications. To modernize these applications, you must first modernize their underlying software platform on top of which they were developed. Once an application is on the modern platform, you are ready to modernize its architecture.

Do you have a modernization question for our team? Shoot us a quick message and we’ll get back in touch with you.

Thanks again to Kathy for the question and the opportunity to share our point of view!

Synchrony Systems named SIIA Business technology Product CODiE Award finalist for best emerging technology

Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP) earns prestigious industry recognition

Greenwich, CT (May 6, 2019) Synchrony Systems, a leader in legacy application modernizations, today announced that MLP was named a 2019 SIIA CODiE Awards finalist in the Best Emerging Technology category. Finalists represent the best products, technologies, and services in software, information and business technology.

 

MLP is a scaleable, cloud-based platform for managing and executing end-to-end migrations and modernizations of legacy IT applications to modern software architectures and platforms. It enables automated code conversion, transformation, remediation and upgrades of millions of lines of code in minutes, ensuring consistent, reliable, and repeatable results. With MLP, upgrading and modernizing legacy applications is no longer disruptive to the business. There are no code freezes of ongoing development since MLP enables parallel upgrades and modernization to run concurrently and continuously with development.

 

The SIIA CODiE Awards are the premier awards for the software and information industries and have been recognizing product excellence for over 30 years. The awards offer 76 categories that are organized by industry focus of education technology and business technology. MLP was honored as one of 137 finalists across the 44 business technology categories.

 

“The 2019 CODiE Award finalists are some of the most innovative, high-impact products in the market. We are thrilled to place a spotlight on these innovations and the power they have to transform the future of how we do business.” said Jeff Joseph, President of SIIA.

 

“We are excited that MLP is a finalist in the Best Emerging Technology category,” said Slavik Zorin, Founder and CEO of Synchrony Systems. “Battling technical debt is a large challenge for IT departments across all industries and will only continue to grow as today’s leading-edge technology is tomorrow’s legacy. MLP provides a technology-agnostic, systematic approach and a uniform process for migrating and upgrading mission-critical proprietary business applications while maintaining 100% functional equivalence and without disrupting the day-to-day business operations. It’s an honor to be recognized by the CODiE judges for our vision and accomplishments thus far.”

 

The SIIA CODiE Awards are the industry’s only peer-recognized awards program. Business technology leaders including senior executives, analysts, media, consultants and investors evaluate assigned products during the first-round review which determines the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners. Winners will be announced during the Business Technology & Company CODiE Award Winner Announcement Party immediately following TechConText, June 12 in San Francisco.

 

Details about each finalist are listed at http://www.siia.net/codie/2019-Finalists

 

About the SIIA CODiE™ Awards

The SIIA CODiE Awards is the only peer-reviewed program to showcase business and education technology’s finest products and services. Since 1986, thousands of products, services and solutions have been recognized for achieving excellence. For more information, visit siia.net/CODiE.

About Synchrony Systems, Inc.

Synchrony Systems has been helping companies modernize their legacy, mission-critical applications for over 20 years. Their extensive experience, deep belief in automation while maintaining agility, and desire to develop a more systematic way to modernize has resulted in the world’s only Modernization Lifecycle Platform (MLP). For more information, visit sync-sys.com/.