Whether you call it Digital Transformation, Digital First, Application Modernization (App Modernization) or some other fancy name, the fact of the matter is, almost every single business is going through some form of transformation to become more competitive in this new digital era. According to a recent survey by VMware, 91% of executives agree their major app initiative in 2021 is to migrate and modernize legacy apps. While this transformation has been going on for some time, the COVID-19 global pandemic has certainly super charged its acceleration and is now a critical imperative for many organizations to be able to create and deliver new digital experiences for their end users.
As part of my role within the VMware Cloud team, I have been taking a closer look at how some of our customers are thinking about their App Modernization strategy and to better understand their overall plan and thought process. With some of the recent customer conversations that I have had, many organizations are just starting their App Modernization journey and one of the challenges that I have observed is simply where and how to get started. There are certainly many different factors that can affect or even slow down these initiatives including organizational structure, tension between lines of businesses, development, operations and IT teams. However, before an organization can decide what application/services they are interested in modernizing, they need to first have a complete understanding of their current application estate.
This understanding is critical before an organization can determine the appropriate modernization strategy (Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor or Retire) for a given application.
