Application modernization company

What does an application modernization company do?

An application modernization company takes software a business already depends on and makes it supportable again, by moving it, restructuring it, rebuilding it or replacing it. The work is chosen from the problem, not from a default, and the honest answer is sometimes to leave the system alone.

The phrase covers more ground than most buyers expect. An application modernization company may spend a project moving a system to cloud infrastructure without changing a line of its logic, or may spend a project rewriting the logic and leaving the infrastructure exactly where it is. Both are modernisation. Which one you need depends on what is actually costing you money, and that question is usually answered badly because it gets asked after the budget has been set.

What brings a mid sized business to this conversation is rarely a wish to be modern. It is a date. A vendor announces end of support. A hardware lease expires. The one person who understood the system retires in March. An auditor asks a question the system cannot answer. The deadline arrives first and the architecture discussion follows, which is the right order even though it feels backwards.

This page is written for companies between roughly fifty and five hundred people, where the system in question runs real operations, the team is small, and a failed cutover is felt on the floor the same week. If you are a bank with a mainframe and a thousand engineers, the vendors on the first page of this search are built for you and we are not.

Modernise, integrate, or leave alone: how do you decide?

Start from where the hours go, not from the architecture. If people are copying data between systems by hand, you need integration. If the system cannot be changed when the business changes, you need modernisation. If neither is true, you need neither, whatever the age of the technology.

Here is the sequence we run, and you can run it yourself before calling anyone.

Count the manual hours and name where they go. Not an estimate, a count, for two weeks. Who opens what, copies what, into what, and how long it takes. Most teams are surprised. The spreadsheet that costs the most is rarely the one anybody complains about.

Ask what the business wanted to do last year and could not. If the answer is a list, the system is blocking change and modernisation has a return. If the answer is nothing in particular, the system is doing its job and the age of its technology is not your problem.

Ask what happens if the person who knows it leaves. If the honest answer is that nobody could make a change, that is a risk with a date on it, and it is the one driver that justifies acting before anything is visibly broken.

Then price the integration first. Connecting two systems so a person stops retyping between them is usually weeks, not quarters. If that removes most of the manual hours, do it, run the modernised plan past the result, and see whether you still want it. Quite often you do not, and an application modernization company that is paid by project size will not suggest this order.

Does Dynamics GP end of support mean we have to modernise?

Dynamics GP end of support gives you a dated deadline, not a requirement to rewrite. Microsoft ends Dynamics GP support on 31 December 2029, with security patches continuing to 30 April 2031. That is enough time to plan properly, and enough time to waste if the decision keeps moving.

This is the clearest example of a deadline driving a modernisation decision, and it is worth stating precisely because several pages ranking for modernisation terms still print the wrong date. Microsoft originally announced 30 September 2029. In its January 2025 lifecycle update it moved the date to 31 December 2029, so customers could close a full fiscal year of payroll and tax obligations rather than cutting over mid quarter. Security updates continue until 30 April 2031. The source is Microsoft's own Dynamics GP documentation and its end of support announcement, not a reseller summary.

The three month shift matters more than it sounds. A finance team cutting over on 1 January starts a clean fiscal year in one system. A team cutting over on 1 October runs two general ledgers through a quarter and a year end simultaneously, which is where reconciliation projects go wrong.

What the deadline does not tell you is which way to go. Business Central is the obvious path and it is not the only one, and for manufacturers the decision is rarely about the general ledger at all. It is about the eleven spreadsheets around the ERP that hold the scheduling, the quality records and the customer specific pricing, none of which migrate automatically and most of which were built because the ERP could not do that job in the first place. Those are the parts to specify before choosing a destination, because they decide how much of the migration is configuration and how much is development.

If you are on Dynamics GP and running production, the useful first step is not a demo. It is an inventory of everything attached to GP: every export, every spreadsheet, every report someone built, every integration. That document is what makes the rest of the decision cheap, and you can write it without hiring anyone.

Should you rewrite all at once or replace it piece by piece?

Piece by piece, in almost every case. Route one workflow at a time through the new system while the old one stays authoritative, and keep the ability to switch back until the new path has matched the old for a full business cycle. A single cutover weekend removes that option exactly when you need it.

The incremental approach is usually called the strangler pattern, after the fig that grows around a tree until the tree is gone and the fig is holding the same shape. The new system wraps the old one, takes one responsibility at a time, and the old system shrinks until nothing is left of it. It is slower on paper and faster in practice, because every step is reversible.

What makes it work is the parallel period. For one full cycle, usually a month and sometimes a quarter, both systems process the same work and somebody compares the outputs. The comparison is tedious and it is the entire point: it is how you find the calculation that has been wrong since 2011 before it is the only calculation you have. Teams under deadline pressure cut this period first, and it is the last thing that should go.

There is one honest exception. When the old system is so unstable that keeping it running through a parallel period costs more than the risk of a clean break, a single cutover is the lesser evil. That is rarer than it is claimed to be, and the claim usually comes from whoever is behind schedule.

What is included in application modernization services?

Assessment of the existing system, a migration plan, the modernisation work itself, data migration with reconciliation, a parallel running period, and handover. The two that decide whether the project succeeds are the first and the fifth, and they are the two most often cut when a deadline tightens.

Assessment. Reading the code, mapping the data, and interviewing the people who use the system daily. The output should be a document you own and could hand to a different firm. If an assessment produces only a proposal, it was a sales exercise.

The migration plan. Which approach for which module, in what order, with the dependencies named. The order matters more than people expect: moving the module with the most integrations first means debugging everything at once.

The modernisation work. The rehosting, refactoring or rebuilding itself. This is the part every description of application modernization services covers well, and the part that usually goes closest to plan, because it is the part the vendor has done before.

Data migration and reconciliation. Moving the records is a week. Proving the new totals match the old ones, to a finance team's satisfaction, across a year end, is a quarter. Budget for the proof rather than the move.

The parallel period. Both systems running the same work while somebody compares the outputs, for a full business cycle. This is where the wrong calculation from 2011 surfaces, and it is the first thing cut when a date gets tight. Protect it.

Handover. Documentation of the decisions rather than the functions, credentials in your name, and a period where your own team makes changes with the vendor watching rather than the other way round. A handover that is a zip file and a final invoice is not a handover.

What is usually not included, and should be discussed before signing: the licence overlap while both systems run, the training time for the people whose daily work changes, and the first three months of small fixes after go live, when the system meets edge cases that discovery did not reach. None of those are hidden costs exactly. They are simply costs that nobody put in the proposal, and they land on the same budget.

How does Voliom run an application modernization project?

Two weeks reading the system and counting the manual hours, then a re-estimated plan with a fixed scope for the first phase, then one workflow at a time with a weekly demo and the old system authoritative until the new one has matched it for a full cycle.

Discovery, two weeks, paid and fixed price. We read the code, map the data, interview the people who use it and count where the hours actually go. The output is a document you own and can take to anyone: what the system does, what is attached to it, what is costing you, and what we would do about it. Roughly a third of the time that document recommends something smaller than modernisation, which is a result rather than a failure.

Re-estimate after discovery, not before. Any number produced before someone has read the system is a guess. We give a range during the first conversation, say what moves it, and replace it with a fixed scope for the first phase once we know what is in there.

One workflow at a time, with a demo every week. You see working software weekly, in your own environment, not a status report. The old system stays authoritative until the new path has matched it through a full cycle, and the switch back stays available until you decide you no longer want it.

Your repository from the first commit. Code, infrastructure and accounts in your name as the work is created. If you want to continue with your own team after the first phase, that is a normal ending rather than a difficult conversation.