Modernizing enterprise applications is a strategic imperative for organizations that want to remain competitive and resilient. According to our recent survey, 80% of respondents are actively modernizing or exploring options for their legacy enterprise Java applications. Delaying modernization increases operational risk, cost, and technical debt, so revamping legacy applications is a must. Proven modernization solutions can support innovation-focused enterprises.
What Is Application Modernization?
Application modernization represents the strategic process of updating, migrating or transforming legacy applications to leverage modern computing approaches, platforms, and infrastructure capabilities. In practice, the process updates legacy software with modern, typically more scalable technologies, such as Jakarta EE and container orchestration.
This transformation encompasses multiple dimensions including technology stack upgrades, architectural restructuring and/or platform migrations that collectively enhance an application’s ability to meet current business demands while supporting future growth initiatives.
Application Modernization Benefits
Updating legacy applications as part of modernization programs can deliver a number of advantages for enterprise IT teams handling such systems, the organizations utilizing the software as well as end users.
Benefit 1: Faster Time to Market, Improved Agility and Customer Experience through Modernized Applications
Legacy Java systems often slow development cycles due to rigid monolithic architectures, outdated frameworks and complex dependencies. Modernized applications, by contrast, are designed for agility. They support modular development and operations rely on automated testing and CI/CD pipelines, so teams can release new features faster and with greater confidence. In addition, modern architectures are typically easily scalable, so they can deliver fast, intuitive and reliable digital experiences.
Case Study Highlight:
A quality management software solution provider leveraged Payar Platform Enterprise to support the modernization of its mission-critical applications as well as streamlining their deployment. Learn more here.
Traditional enterprise Java applications were rarely built with elastic scaling in mind. Application modernizations can deliver substantial performance improvements through architectural optimizations and resource efficiency gains that directly impact organizational productivity metrics.
Modern applications leverage cloud-native scaling technologies that can automatically adjust computing resources based on real-time demand, eliminating performance bottlenecks that commonly affect legacy systems. These improvements typically result in faster processing speeds and reduced latency that enhance both user experiences and backend operational efficiency.
Benefit 3: Optimized Operational Cost Savings
Maintaining legacy systems can be quite expensive. Specialized skills are harder to find, infrastructure is often overprovisioned and downtime can be costly. Application modernization helps reduce these costs by lowering infrastructure overhead through containerization and reducing maintenance effort through supported, up-to-date platforms.
Enterprise Application:
Enterprise-grade platforms with built-in management and monitoring capabilities can further streamline operations and reduce the burden on IT teams. By consolidating on Payara Platform Enterprise suite of supported runtimes, customers can reduce both direct and indirect IT costs, e.g. by lowering licensing and support fees compared to traditional legacy platforms or proprietary software.
Case Study Highlight:
By moving to Payara Platform Enterprise, a leading hotel group was able to reduce its licensing costs by 60%. Read more here.
Benefit 4: Competitive Advantage and Market Relevance
In fast-moving markets, the ability to adapt quickly often determines whether an organization leads or falls behind. Legacy applications can limit responsiveness, making it difficult to introduce new digital services, respond to customer expectations, or capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Modernization enables rapid response to business opportunities and regulatory changes. More precisely, application modernization enables businesses to stay relevant by supporting rapid innovation and continuous improvement. Modern platforms allow organizations to launch new capabilities faster, integrate more easily with new technologies and ecosystems as well as respond proactively to market changes.
As a result, organizations can differentiate themselves through improved customer experiences, faster delivery cycles and greater operational flexibility. This not only strengthens competitive positioning today but also ensures the business is prepared to compete effectively as technologies, markets and customer expectations continue to evolve.
Benefit 5: Seamless Integration and Interoperability
Support and compatibility with legacy systems shrinks over time, as such older Java applications often struggle to integrate with modern tools, cloud services and third-party platforms, creating silos that slow innovation and decision-making while increasing technical debt.
Modern applications can more easily connect with any modern technologies, thus they can more easily expose and consume services, integrate with cloud-native technologies and interoperate across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Even more, standards-based platforms, such as Jakarta EE, help ensure consistent interoperability while reducing integration complexity.
Enterprise Application:
Payara Platform Enterprise is designed around interoperability and compatibility. For example, it offers an extensive suite of developer tools and connectors.
Benefit 6: Better Developer Productivity
Application modernization can improve developer productivity in a very practical way, supporting day-to-day activities by lowering cognitive load, shortening feedback loops, and avoiding any wrestling associated with outdated systems.
Modernized applications are easier to understand and change, due to cleaner, containerized microservices architectures, so they can reduce the mental effort required to make updates. Tooling also improves significantly. Instead of navigating a fragile, tightly coupled codebase and handling a multitude of manual fixes, developers can focus on the part they’re responsible for and move faster with more confidence.
Benefit 7: Fortified Security and Compliance
Security is critical for enterprise applications, particularly in regulated industries. Legacy systems often rely on outdated frameworks, unsupported libraries end-of-life (EOS) and/or end-of-support (EOS) technologies that can create vulnerabilities. Modernization allows applications to adopt the latest security strategies and tools while streamlining updates and new feature implementation.
Benefit 8: A Foundation for Addressing Technical Debt and Future-Proofing
Legacy applications often carry significant technical debt, e.g. through outdated components and tightly coupled code. Modernization creates the infrastructure to adopt emerging technologies and cloud-native services.
By updating applications for microservices, container orchestration, reactive programming and event-driven architectures, enterprises reduce technical debt and establish a maintainable, flexible codebase. This foundation ensures applications remain adaptable to future needs, helping businesses to innovate quickly without constantly rebuilding systems.
Case Study Highlight:
By modernizing a financial literacy platform with Payara Platform Enterprise, an organization was able to more than double user capacity per machine while helping the development team to keep the application up to date. Learn more about the project here.
Successful Application Modernization with Payara
Application modernization is most effective when supported by a platform designed for enterprise reliability, performance and long-term support. Payara Platform Enterprise suite of runtimes provides organizations with a proven, standards-based foundation for modernizing legacy Java applications while minimizing risk and disruption.
By supporting a variety of technologies and older versions, such as Java EE 8, Payara Platform Enterprise enables teams to modernize incrementally or at scale, based on business priorities. Organizations can reduce technical debt, improve developer productivity and accelerate innovation without sacrificing stability or compliance. With flexible deployment options, long-term support and expert backing, Payara Platform Enterprise can ultimately help turn legacy systems into future-ready applications that drive sustainable business growth.
Payara Platform Enterprise offers three key products that support different types of application modernization and requirements.
Payara Server Enterprise is an enterprise-grade Jakarta EE application server designed for modernizing existing Java applications with minimal risk. It is ideal for monoliths and mission-critical systems that require stability, long-term support and security updates. It enables incremental modernization without rewriting applications.
Payara Micro Enterprise is a lightweight, cloud-native runtime for building and running Jakarta EE microservices. Packaged as a single executable, it is optimized for containers, allowing teams to deploy and scale services independently and move faster.
Payara Qube is a platform that simplifies deploying and running Java applications but handling infrastructure. It provides enterprise-ready Kubernetes configurations, observability and lifecycle management, reducing operational complexity and accelerating cloud adoption.
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