Imagine a pile of wet spaghetti.
Instead of piling on the parmesan and sauce and chowing down, you’re tasked with straightening every noodle out on the plate. But there’s a catch – only one string of spaghetti is allowed to move at a time.
How long would this take you? Would it even be possible? As each noodle you grab inevitably makes a neighboring noodle move, would you just give up, or devour it in frustration instead?
What we’re describing is the process of modernizing your monolithic architecture. Except you can’t even eat it.
Everything should be modernized by now, right?
A casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that after years of businesses fixating on cloud and digital transformation, and certainly now in the AI era, that monolithic application architectures would be a thing of the past.
On the contrary, monoliths remain entrenched. Every IT staff has that one app, where if you gave them a magic wand, the first thing they’d do is modernize it (or shoot it into the sun). These apps are a nightmare to fix when something goes wrong. Given the interdependent nature of the architecture, you can’t tell which piece isn’t working, and every “fix” breaks something else.
Yet despite the well-known benefits of microservices – better user experience, faster time-to-market, lower infrastructure costs, more business agility, to name a few – why are so many critical apps running on yesterday’s architecture?
For some pretty good reasons, it turns out.
- App Modernization is risky
While the cloud is ready-made for modern applications that leverage a group of services, like serverless, containers, or clustering, that doesn’t describe most enterprise applications. App modernization project failures are very common; like 79%(!) common.
- App Modernization is time consuming
Projects tend to fail because monoliths have that spaghetti architecture described at the top. They are very complex, and interdependent. Even when successful, more than half of software leaders say the typical app modernization effort takes 16 months, while 27% say they take two or more years.
- App Modernization is expensive
Risk plus complexity plus time. It doesn’t take a math whiz to know that this equation equals $$$. Almost 75% of leaders surveyed say a typical modernization effort can cost on average $1.5 million.
This set of challenges, once dissected, often forces teams to knock app modernization down the list of top organizational priorities. They then miss out on the flexibility, scalability, and innovation potential on offer from modern apps. This decision to grin and bear it (i.e. limit a critical application’s potential and pay more to maintain it) does make a certain amount of sense when weighed against a risky, time-consuming, expensive modernization.
So microservices > monoliths, but is there an easy way to get there?
The million-dollar question. Until a few months ago, the answer would have been, “not really.”
Today, Presidio and our clients can confidently say “YES.” That’s because we looked at these challenges that we consistently run into and had an epiphany: in the time of AI, this spaghetti should be easier to twirl.
So we created Human AI (HAI) Modernize , a human-centric AI accelerator that can transform legacy monoliths into cloud-ready microservices at a fraction of the time, risk, and cost.
It does so by using Agentic AI designed specifically to simplify legacy application transformation. This agent-based architecture is key; it allows us to extend beyond standard modernization scenarios through custom agent development and orchestration as needed. This way we can address even the most complex challenges an application team might face.
By blending AI acceleration with human inputs, HAI Modernize ensures accurate results.
Some of the modernization scenarios this groundbreaking AI acceleration methodology can address include:
- Rebuild User Experiences: When you want to modernize the user interface and user experience layers while retaining your existing, robust backend systems.
- Re-platform & Refactor: Migrate business-critical features from a monolithic application into independent microservices. HAI Modernize facilitates this by incrementally carving out services and modernizing key functionalities with minimal disruption.
- Assess & Rearchitect: For a more comprehensive transformation, HAI Modernize can analyze the complexities of an entire application and guide a complete re-architecting process. This enables the creation of a secure, scalable, and cloud-ready solution, ideal for moving entire applications to a modern, cloud-native architecture and addressing deep-seated architectural challenges.
- Incremental Refactor: When a phased, iterative approach is preferred, HAI Modernize assists with incrementally upgrading frameworks, refactoring code for improved maintainability, and adopting service-oriented principles within existing applications. Systematically reduce technical debt and modernize applications over time.
- Isolated Upgrade: Address specific pain points within complex legacy systems, focused on targeted tech debt isolation and AI-powered auto-remediation. For example, upgrading specific components to supported versions, mitigating risks and stabilizing legacy systems.
Driven by Agentic AI combined with our crucial human-in-the-loop approach, you can ensure that your application team’s expertise remains central throughout the modernization journey. This collaborative methodology results in an app modernization process that is not only faster and safer but also delivers a higher-quality outcome.
Most solution providers fear running into monolithic apps in their clients’ environments.
At Presidio, we love monoliths: they give us an opportunity to take our clients’ mission-critical apps and vault them into the future. Another previously unmanageable problem, solved by Presidio.
Who’s hungry?
