Top Application Modernization Tools and Solutions
Streamline Your Digital Transformation Efforts
Modernizing applications is a top priority for most organizations, with 87% surveyed saying the vast majority of their Java applications need modernizing. The drivers are many, such as taking advantage of cloud capabilities, boosting security, reducing licensing and infrastructure costs, and helping developers be more productive, yet many digital transformation efforts get delayed, are costlier than expected, and outright fail. Why? Primarily, it’s because there isn’t a blueprint on how to approach it, a recommendation of top application modernization tools to use, or how to get a budget for it. Modernization is complicated, and the longer it’s shelved, the bigger the technical debt impact.
Accumulated architectural debt can not only be a roadblock to modernization, it can have catastrophic consequences. Architects typically know debt exists, but it’s difficult to find inside complex monoliths and is risky to manage given existing toolsets.
- If you can’t see it, how can you measure it?
- Even if you discover it, which tools would you use to accurately measure and analyze its complexity so you can build a business case justifying the resources to fix it?
- If you get the funding, how do you approach technical debt while maintaining code quality?
- How do you ensure that technical debt doesn’t keep accumulating after you modernize?
There is a price to technical debt. IDG reports 70% of CIOs admit that technical debt limits innovation, 72% say it prevents modernization efforts, and 69% believe it dramatically impacts their market responsiveness.
Streamlining digital transformation efforts begins with addressing technical debt. If you want your modernization efforts to succeed, getting your technical debt under control as part of your modernization efforts is a best practice.
What Are Application Modernization Tools and Solutions?
Successful application modernization begins with using modern tools and solutions built to address all aspects of digital transformation. Today’s architectures are too complex to approach modernization manually or with tools that only look at code quality. Top application modernization solutions must be comprehensive, providing visibility into the architecture to identify, source and measure architectural technical debt so you can:
- Baseline and track patterns and drift over time
- Separate and identify domains and services
- Rapidly transform complex monolithic applications into microservices
- Continually modernize to prevent future debt accumulation
Why are Automated Application Modernization Tools Necessary?
The best application modernization solutions are based on AI automation to go where most humans cannot, with greater precision and efficiency. Manual or incomplete application modernization solutions do not paint the whole picture or take all of the necessary steps to resolve the technical debt issue and prevent it from reoccurring. With the right solution, however, organizations can save countless hours and dollars now and into the future, decreasing security risks and increasing modernization success to take advantage of the cloud, innovation and growth opportunities.
Application Modernization Resources
Analyst eBook: Raiders of the Lost Apps — An Adventurer’s Guidebook for Uncovering Technical Debt Through Modernization
Learn how technical debt impacts application modernization efforts and how the right toolset enables you to identify, eliminate and prevent it from returning without breaking the bank or requiring years or incurring so much risk.
Whitepaper: Technical Debt — A Guide for Frustrated Software Architects and CIOs
Technical debt is more than a hassle, as IDC mentions, it prevents innovation, resilience, and growth. Discover how technical debt hampers velocity and how a data-driven approach to managing it works.
Why Application Modernization Is Now a Top Priority for CIOs
Application modernization tools and solutions are a requirement to support the global movement to address aging monolithic applications. In this podcast, you’ll hear from Ashmeet Sidana, chief engineer and founder of Engineering Capital, as he explains why these tools must be added to the tech stack now.
3 Top Application Modernization Tools and Solutions
vFunction provides an end-to-end application modernization solution with three tools that are best used together but are flexible enough to be used independently if needed. These are not only the most advanced application modernization tools on the market, but our comprehensive platform is the first and only of its kind on the market that simplifies, streamlines and accelerates modernization efforts by addressing the root cause of modernization failures: technical debt.
Assessment Hub
Assessment Hub vFunction Assessment Hub is an AI-powered technical debt solution that automatically and rapidly analyzes the technical debt of your on-premise and cloud-based monolithic applications. Beyond simply identifying the debt, Assessment Hub determines the source and complexity of the debt and provides the insight you need to understand the impact it’s having on innovation and the organization as a whole.
The benefits of Assessment Hub are many, particularly when you’re tasked with building a business case. Armed with data and transparency into your application estate, you are more likely to get executive buy-in and the budget you need to properly approach modernization.
Instead of guessing, you have data that clearly indicates which applications to prioritize, how long modernization efforts will take, and how complex it will be. Rich analytics and reporting automatically calculate the TCO of not modernizing contrasted by the ROI potential of modernizing on a per-application basis. All of these factors, plus many other metrics, strengthen a business case for modernization and provide a detailed roadmap to optimize success.
The vFunction Assessment Hub seamlessly integrates with the vFunction Modernization Hub so when you are ready, you can immediately begin refactoring, re-architecting, or rewriting the prioritized applications.
Modernization Hub
Modernization Hub Now that you know where your architectural technical debt is and which applications to tackle first, vFunction Modernization Hub is ready to automatically transform the identified monolithic applications into more manageable microservices.
Instead of trying to modernize using manual efforts and unrelated tools, or relying on lift-and-shift methods that do not modernize apps, Modernization Hub uses AI to accelerate and inform the refactoring process . It greatly reduces the risk, cost and time associated with modernization efforts. Modernization Hub serves as mission control, giving architects insight into business domain-driven application flows and dependencies in a safe environment, plus the flexibility to refactor, re-architect or rewrite complex monoliths into microservices to increase engineering velocity and application scalability.
All of this can be accomplished iteratively allowing you to leverage the Strangler Fig Pattern to incrementally drain traffic and functionality from the monolith. You’ll see a dashboard of each application modernization project with drill-down details. Technical debt can no longer hide, and monolithic application beasts are no longer a burden, broken apart into workable pieces to speed testing cycles and empower more regular releases.
Continuous Modernization Manager
Continuous Modernization Manager Once you have technical debt under control and have broken down monoliths into microservices, the goal is to keep the architecture estate stable, healthy and manageable to avoid future monoliths from growing. The vFunction Continuous Modernization Manager rounds out our suite of top application modernization solutions, supporting an organizational cultural shift that sees the need for and advantage of continual modernization.
It’s the first shift left application modernization tool for software architects that continuously monitors, baselines, detects and isolates critical application architecture anomalies before they cause harm.
This shift-left approach enables software architects to monitor the architectural health of their applications, know when to modernize and which apps to prioritize, and resolve issues before technical debt has the chance to balloon. You’re fixing smaller issues as they arise instead of after they accumulate into much larger, costlier projects that slow engineering velocity.
Use the Assessment Hub helps to build your business case, Modernization Hub to fix the issues, and Continuous Modernization Manager to prevent architecture problems in the future. Whether you first want to see what architectural technical debt you have or are ready to implement the full lifecycle of modernization solutions, vFunction’s top application modernization solution addresses technical debt issues once and for all.
Going Deeper
How Unchecked Technical Debt Can Result in a Business Catastrophe
Think you have time to deal with technical debt? Think again. Technical debt hamstrung Southwest Airlines, the FAA, and Twitter, but many smaller organizations have dealt with lesser publicized incidents. Read how to avoid the same fate.
Shift Left for Architects: vFunction Launches Continuous Modernization Manager
Learn more about the need for continuous modernization as a best practice, the value of architectural observability, and how vFunction has developed a first-of-its-kind application modernization tool to prevent technical debt from accumulating.
Case Study: How Correla Modernized Their Critical Gemini Applications that Support UK’s National Gas
Sometimes, reading an actual use case is the best way to understand the benefits of a product or service. In this case study, you’ll hear about the common challenges Correla faced and how they completed a full, dynamic and static code analysis of 10M lines of code in just over a week.