The term “Legacy applications” is thrown around too much in the tech world, but what exactly does it mean? Why is it important in today’s world to modernise these legacy systems? This blog article is all about exploring why and how a legacy application may be holding your business back - and what you can do about it.
What exactly is a Legacy Application?
A legacy application is an out-of-date but essential software that an organisation relies on for their day-to-day operations. These applications would have been developed years ago with outdated technology or programming languages. Even if they were functional, it might be really hard (and sometimes expensive) to use, maintain, integrate or upgrade these systems. Think of an old car you have which does get you from A to B, but it needs constant repairs, doesn’t assure safety and will hold you up from reaching your destination. Isn’t it the same to be using a legacy application?
What value does modernising a SaaS product bring to a business?
As businesses evolve, so do their operational and customer demands. Modernization makes sure that these applications stay relevant, functional and adaptable.
For instance, take a SaaS product that has been built over the last 5+ years with a substantial client base. What's the next step to create value as a business? Perhaps launching in a new market to grow in revenue or perhaps preparing for an exit or merging with a bigger player with the backing of private equity or venture capital. For a SaaS company to achieve any of these, outdated technology, poor user experience, security vulnerabilities, and higher maintenance costs are less appealing propositions.
Modernization presents a new opportunity for a SaaS product business from falling behind in competition to emerging products in their segment, improving cost efficiency and reducing operational expenses. At the same time to better comply with industry regulations, increase scalability, and improve user and customer experience. In simple words, modernization is a value creator for outdated SaaS products.
How would you identify a legacy application?
- They are built with outdated programming languages or technologies
- Face security vulnerabilities and obtaining certifications like ISO 27001 or SOC2 is tough
- The maintenance cost is high due to outdated software architecture
- Outdated user interface design makes users frustrated or opt for customer support
- It is difficult to scale or launch in new markets since the capabilities are limited
- They have limited, or no compatibility with modern software
- No proper documentation as the software was built by many over the years
Bumpy road to SaaS product modernisation.
While outdated software products function to support daily operations, owing to the identified limitations, they hinder business growth, security and efficiency if you decide to keep them in their outdated state. In SaaS product companies in particular, that operate outdated SaaS products, business leaders are starting to recognise the need to modernise to stay competitive with modern products that emerge in their segment.
Complexity, Cost and organisational pushback
In a study conducted by Wakefield Research, Why app modernization projects fail? 79% of application modernization projects have failed to achieve their expected goals. As the research suggests cost, complexity, and organisational pushback are the main factors that project managers face which contribute to these failures.
These projects are indeed time-consuming and costly: according to a recent survey involving IT leaders with titles like manager, director, VP, and CIO, 93% of survey respondents mentioned their experience as “extremely or somewhat challenging”. Not just from the engineering perspective but also from an organisation culture perspective, as cited by 20% of the respondents, “finding the right internal staff members” was one of the most difficult parts of the process.
In our recent modernisation projects, we observed similar patterns as well. So if you are experiencing similar pains in your SaaS product modernisation initiative you are definitely not alone.
Avoid these pitfalls at all costs
We’ll just upgrade everything
You must restrain yourself from falling is the blanket approach: “We’ll just upgrade everything”. Yet, not all the features require the same level of modernization. For example, if “master data setup” is used once in a while but sending invoices is used daily, what do you think makes sense to prioritise? It’s “sending invoices”.
Prioritise your effort based on the value it creates. Start by listing down the features of your application and rate their importance based on the frequency of use and business impact. To do that, you can talk to end users and department heads such as customer support. They will be able to provide insights into how you can rank the features. Then for each feature, decide on measurable metrics like speed improvement, error reduction, or user satisfaction.
Changing product UI design drastically
When you are doing a product redesign, refrain from creating a completely new interface that can alienate existing frequent users. What users need are improvements, not complete unfamiliarity. So it’s important to strike a balance. For that, observe how users currently interact with the application by scheduling 1-1 sessions with the most loyal clients, conducting surveys, and identifying the instances where users need a better interface.
Another approach that has worked well with our clients is phased rollouts of the improved user interface updates. Where we introduce UI changes gradually, allowing the users to get used to the new features over time. And provide simple onboarding instructions on the UI itself to reduce the customer support costs.
Delay in documentation or not documenting at all
A structured documentation is essential to restrain from missing out on crucial dependencies, which leads to deployment issues. Start with an application audit to uncover undocumented features, code dependencies, hardcoded configurations and further areas that need attention.
According to a survey conducted, 65% of CTOs stated that the biggest challenge they face in modernising legacy applications is the accumulated technical debt and dependencies within the software. Make sure that your product team has experience in both legacy systems and modernization. If not someone who has been with the product to bridge the gap between the product team and the user.
At Amplifyn start almost all modernisation projects by introducing a dedicated business analyst to ensure documentation is ready from business, product feature and technical perspectives. This approach works so well that delays caused by miscommunications and misinterpretations during the engineering phase are minimised considerably.
Underestimating data migration
Another pitfall to avoid is overlooking data migration complexity as migration without thorough testing can lead to missing records, misconfigurations, and even legal complications such as ISO, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, where applicable. This is attested through Data Migration Pro where they declared that 60% of data migration projects exceed their budget due to unanticipated complexities.
So, Backup and have a roll-back path! It cannot be stressed enough. Product modernisation however presents a whole new set of challenges, especially when modernisation involves database schema changes. To ensure smooth migration use a staging environment and introduce a user acceptance testing (UAT) phase. In addition, having the data consolidation and integrity checks running at each internal release via automated scripts will save a lot of time and reduce the risk significantly when database schema changes are involved.
Not focusing on self onboarding
One of the critical aspects of SaaS product growth is how well a user can self onboard themselves and co-workers to the product. Marketing teams desire this the most. Failing to support user self onboarding simply means most of your advertising spend is lost halfway through. And when it comes to users' poor first impressions, they chase them away to other products. Your competitors. When you start a software modernisation initiative as a value creator of the business this is an area you must not lose sight.
In really designing a self onboarding user experience isn't magic. Gradually guide the user with a simple set of steps to complete the signup and configure only the required setup. At the end allow the user to invite their co-workers to collaborate on the platform. A skilled user experience designer will know how to compliment users with value in each onboarding step. You may also choose to show contextual help and support tips to assist the users in getting used to the user interface and features. A thoughtful user experience design in SaaS product modernisation is critical and rewarding.
Avoiding gradual transition
Another fact is that modernization leads to disruptions in business operations, especially during the transition phase. These typically come in as an increase in customer support tickets, usability issues, existing users finding it hard to understand the new UI design, and data inconsistencies. According to Jack Godau, the CTO Doctorly, “Outages are not possible. There can be no critical disruption to service, which means, testing, planning, testing, planning, and repeat until we’re certain”.
Thus, using a staging environment to test the modernised application, running a closed beta phase with a selected set of clients, and incrementally rolling out the production deployment is essential. In addition, you may also develop and adhere to a contingency plan which will establish confidence in company leadership.
One might think this is a long list of things and won't be worth the effort. In reality, it’s not. Particularly when you embrace the gradual transition mindset as the product manager in charge.
Refactor, Replatform or Rebuild?
Choosing the right modernization strategy is the most crucial part, but the pros and cons of each should be considered.
With refactoring, incremental changes to the application’s code are done without actually changing its core functionality. Its goal is to improve the structure, security, performance and maintainability of the code. Refactoring is useful when the application mostly meets current needs but could benefit from certain optimizations to enhance speed, reduce bugs or make future updates easier. However, this approach won’t address larger issues related to outdated technology or scalability needs.
Replatforming (also called “lift and shift”) is about moving the application to a new platform or infrastructure and making minimal changes to its codebase. This is best for applications that need to be moved to a modern, flexible environment while improving scalability and enhancing application performance. But this might reveal compatibility issues with the new environment increase in technical infrastructure subscription costs, which may require new skills introduced to the existing product team.
Rebuilding is the approach where the application is completely developed gradually to a new yet better platform. This requires time and resources. However, it brings about maximum flexibility to design a SaaS software product which can compete with emerging products. SaaS companies choose this approach when they plan for a growth phase.
While each of these strategies has both pros and cons, it is important to choose the right strategy based on the specific goals, budget and technical constraints.
You can opt-in for a product modernisation audit, which compiles all of our SaaS product modernisation experience into a set of personalised recommendations based on your unique goals.
Quick-wins to get started with SaaS product modernisation
Breaking down applications into microservices is a step you can take to enable modular development and faster updates.
You won’t stand a chance if product user experience is poor. Make the best use of your modernisation by doing a gradual product redesign to stay compelling and attractive.
Low-code and No-code platforms also allow businesses to implement and deploy applications at a faster pace with minimal coding.
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) will give you automation capabilities in place of repetitive tasks while reducing manual effort and human error.
DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines are also essential in automating deployment, testing, and feedback loops for faster and more reliable releases.
The biggest pitfall of all?
The mindset shift of your existing product team. Let’s face it they have been on it for years and are very comfortable as things are. They have all the strength but a mindset shift is needed. As IBM puts it: “A cultural transformation is also imperative” to avoid the pitfalls in the modernization journey. This is also one of the most valuable lessons we have learnt from working on modernisation projects.
How do you achieve the mindset shift?
Assess the current state of your team. Consider both the continuity of existing operations and what’s needed to achieve the goals of modernization. Identify and involve team members who believe in the vision you aspire to for the pilots. They are your bridge from legacy to modern. With their support, you can create a plan of action that prioritises the modernization initiative based on business value.
Involve a business analyst early on and let them collaborate with the pilots to document all the nuances of the product, technical debt, features, and business use cases. This will help you avoid missing critical elements that could slow down the engineering phase. It will also enable you to foresee risks early and estimate the modernization effort with a higher degree of accuracy.
Modernization requires fresh ideas. Consider redesigning your company branding and onboarding a subset of new team members who possess relevant technical skills. Maintain engineering leadership under your direct supervision and assign one of the pilots to take on the role of product owner. This combination of new perspectives and product expertise creates a powerful synergy. This is the mindset shift you need to fuel the modernization journey.
Reap the business value through product modernisation
As a manager, having a clear understanding of the business value created through a modernization initiative is critical. Embracing a mindset focused on gradual improvements is the only path to success. Failing to prioritise small wins based on business value, not identifying risks early, and neglecting to consciously shift the mindset of existing product team members are the biggest pitfalls to avoid. Creating synergy between fresh ideas and in-house expertise is a significant advantage that can help you navigate the bumpy road toward a rewarding destination.
