Company
This Fortune 500 leader generates billions in revenue while serving the construction, mining, energy, and transportation industries. Driven by innovation, it continues to advance and optimize operations across its global business portfolio.
Background
A vast network of engineering teams and a highly intricate supply chain help this global company deliver cutting-edge technology and solutions that drive progress.
A key driver of innovation within the organization is its Application Center of Excellence (COE), which serves as a strategic advisor for hundreds of applications throughout the company, guiding teams on the best tools and technologies to adopt for long-term success.
Challenge – the need for modernization
The organization faced two key obstacles: technical and personnel-related. On the technical side, many of their core applications—written in Java and developed over 20 years ago—were challenging to modernize, with earlier in-house attempts at breaking down monoliths into manageable components yielding limited results.
On the personnel side, the company relied on highly specialized team members, many of whom had worked on these applications for over a decade. These subject matter experts (SMEs) held critical, sometimes undocumented knowledge essential for maintaining and modernizing the applications. Capturing and transferring this knowledge became a priority for ensuring continuity.
The defining moment
The company’s legacy applications were a major obstacle to engineering velocity. Small updates required extensive testing, leading to quarterly release cycles. Fear of breaking critical systems in their highly customized applications made teams hesitant to move faster. It became clear that an automated modernization approach was needed to streamline deployments, reduce risk, and improve agility.
Accelerating application modernization with vFunction
The Application COE recognized the need for a structured approach to modernization to accelerate outcomes. After evaluating potential solutions, they identified vFunction to analyze legacy applications, decompose architectural complexity, and automate the extraction of modular components.
20 year-old on-premises Java monolith to a modular monolith Java Spring Boot
The team started with a midsize application to manage emissions compliance globally, aiming to extract a single module from the monolith and iteratively build a modular monolith. The first module took time as they learned how to disentangle it from other modules through focused refactoring. However, this first step laid the groundwork for a repeatable modernization process, enabling them to move significantly faster when tackling subsequent modules. With the business logic modularized, they plan on converting the modular monolith into a set of Spring Boot microservices.
Moving towards a modernization factory
By leveraging vFunction’s data-driven insights, the team gains an accurate, real-time view of their application structure, eliminating guesswork and enabling a more precise and efficient modernization effort.
Perhaps most importantly, they’ve experienced a noticeable behavioral shift — confidence in their ability to drive change. The team now releases updates monthly, adhering to a schedule that aligns with their workflows and affirms the benefits of a successful modernization program.
What’s next: From modular monoliths to microservices
Java monolith to microservices, with RedHat OpenShift containers
Now, the company is modernizing a high-impact, revenue-critical application with a full microservices approach, marking a shift from modular monoliths. To support this transformation, the company is standardizing the deployment of containers on Red Hat OpenShift.
By leveraging vFunction’s architectural observability platform, this longstanding F500 organization is transforming its applications into a modern, scalable, and future-ready portfolio that ensures long-term success in an evolving technology landscape.
