Modern Systems
Modernizing Legacy Systems, Delivering Competitive Edge to Enterprises

Legacy systems have become increasingly prohibitive to companies who value their IT as a component to their competitive landscape. High licensing and operational costs of outdated technologies running on legacy mainframe platforms are not suited for keeping up with newer elastic based technologies. “Legacy systems are expensive to operate in comparison to modern platforms and they do not support the agility and speed of extensions available with the newer environment. Statistics show some companies may spend up to 70 percent of their entire IT budget maintaining these systems leaving only a small portion available for new growth,” points out Brandon Edenfield, President, and CEO, Modern Systems. Adding further, Edenfield says that the aging workforce is finally a reality companies cannot overlook. “The people most experienced with the existing legacy systems are now at retirement age or beyond and the ability to get new people to work on these older technologies is just not available. If this issue is not addressed, companies will find themselves falling farther and farther behind their competition who are extending their efficiencies and offerings at a much more rapid pace.”

Here is where Modern Systems comes into the picture. Whether it is assisting enterprises on their journey toward the cloud, which could include an incremental move to cloud-native microservices, or taking advantage of DevOps methodologies, machine learning or artificial intelligence, Modern Systems empowers them by delivering solutions that are scalable, cost-effective and fully managed. “We are not a software company that sells software or a service company that does services. We are a solutions company that uses software to automate the assessment and conversion of legacy applications into a cloud ready, optimized or native environment allowing customers to more efficiently compete in today’s environment. Our approach ensure that a customer retains existing business functionality, and the value inherent in the core applications, while extending these applications and services going forward in the future,” states Cameron Jenkins, Executive Vice President, Modern Systems.

Having an experience of 35 years in leading assessments and conversions of legacy application and database code, Modern Systems provides IT enterprises with the best approach for their transformation journey. The company not only helps them meet their immediate needs, such as reducing IT costs, meeting compliance demands, and streamlining resources, it also uniquely helps them see the big picture and prepare for the future. It has the most diverse range of legacy modernization services on the market, supported by the most experienced modernization resources in the world. “Our combined resources, software, and services make us one of the most preeminent independent as well as the most experienced migration companies in the world. We help our clients, primarily Fortune 1000 global enterprises, in analyzing and assessing their legacy codebases while reducing their application footprint, and transforming their legacy environment,” says Jenkins.

Modern Systems’ Modernization Platform as a Service (ModPaaS), is a purpose-built, customizable cloud solution that is available in the cloud on the top cloud provider marketplaces, including AWS, Azure, Oracle and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “We are excited about our ModPaaS listing on GCP Marketplace,” said Edenfield.

“Our Fortune 1000 customers are looking to modernize their legacy environments and move critical workloads to the cloud. Many of them are anxious to reap GCP Marketplace benefits including proven performance and Google grade end-to-end security,” mentions Jenkins. ModPaaS allows for highly collaborative participation throughout the journey of a legacy application modernization project.

It also enables clients to move through the modernization process at their own pace in an entirely self-service manner, with assistance from Modern Systems modernization specialists, or in a fully managed approach–like a traditional project engagement.

Our Fortune 1000 customers are looking to modernize their legacy environments and move critical workloads to the cloud. Many of them are anxious to reap GCP Marketplace benefits, including proven performance and Google grade end-to-end security

Edenfield says they begin every modernization initiative with an assessment which leverages automated tooling to identify, classify and analyze customer assets and determining the modernization approach and roadmap best suited for organization as a whole or groups of applications individually. During this process the team ensures that everything that the asset to be modernized is complete with no missing components and also refines the inventory removing what is not used or needed to be included. This process often reduces the inventory originally submitted by 30% to 70% which is a tremendous benefit to any project. Our primary goal is to be ensure that we plan and set mutual expectations properly up front so that we can predictably complete a successful engagement with our customers.” elucidates Edenfield.

To date, Modern Systems has completed more than 300 projects, with 2.5 billion lines of code processed. One of its projects was with The New York Times when the client had a critical business workload running on a mainframe as the core IT system supporting the daily Home Delivery Platform of its newspaper. Modern Systems successfully transformed its legacy COBOL-based application into a modern Java-based application, which today runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The application was modernized to object-oriented code using innovative automated refactoring, and the data was transformed from legacy indexed-files to a relational database,” explains Jenkins.

Due to its unmatched dedication and approach, Modern Systems has recently been named a leader in Forrester’s Now Tech: Application Modernization and Migration Services Q1 2019 Report. The report is carved for Infrastructure and operations professionals to recognize the crucial segments and potential of application modernization and migration services providers to inform their selection strategies. Upon receiving the recognization, Edenfield says, “Forrester’s report could not come at a more optimal time, as it offers valuable and relevant information about various types of offerings to help customers make more informed modernization decisions. We are proud to be acknowledged by Forrester.”

In future also, Modern Systems aims to continue to serve its clients with utmost dedication. “We will continue to understand the changing demands of our clients and develop new and improved solutions to meet their unique requirements and deliver successful engagements on time and in a predictable budget,” concludes Edenfield.