Case Studies / Enterprise Technology
Legacy Application Modernization • Enterprise Technology
The Technical Debt Handoff That Boosted Revenue 30%
How a 20-year industry leader partnered with us to migrate 15 legacy applications while their team built the future, reducing incidents by 60% and increasing sales conversion by 8 percentage points.
Two decades of technical debt, after an acquisition
After two decades of feature-first development, this market-leading company faced a critical inflection point. Following an acquisition, their new CTO made a bold decision: pause feature development to address mounting technical debt that was threatening business growth.
Key pain points included:
- 20+ years of accumulated technical debt across multiple platforms
- 50 engineers stuck maintaining legacy systems instead of innovating
- Inefficient deployment processes causing frequent production issues
- Knowledge silos between Infrastructure and Software teams
- Unmanageable microservices architecture lacking observability
Full ownership of legacy, so their team could build the future
We became an extension of their team, taking complete ownership of legacy systems while enabling their engineers to focus on building the future.
Comprehensive Migration Strategy
Led "The Big Migration" — transitioning 15 legacy applications to a new V2 AWS environment managed with Terraform and infrastructure as code, with strict security controls.
DevOps Transformation
Implemented 12-factor principles across all applications, moved from Jenkins to GitHub Actions, and established automated testing and deployment pipelines.
Observability Implementation
Deployed Datadog monitoring across the entire stack, enabling proactive incident response before customer impact and reducing average weekly errors by 50%.
Security Remediation
Established continuous security scanning, remediated over 1,000 security vulnerabilities, and achieved PCI compliance for the organization.
From embedded partner to long-term ownership
Phase 1: Onboarding & Discovery
Embedded with client teams to understand the technical environment, completing initial migrations while building comprehensive system knowledge.
Phase 2: Independent Operations
Took full ownership of legacy systems, accelerating migration pace while client engineers transitioned to new development work.
Phase 3: Stabilization & Optimization
Continued migrations while implementing monitoring, security improvements, and operational excellence practices.
Phase 4: Long-Term Partnership
Maintaining and improving legacy systems while supporting gradual modernization efforts.
Beyond technical wins, into business growth
The transformation delivered measurable business value beyond technical improvements:
Business Impact
- 8 percentage-point increase in sales conversion
- Reduced churn through improved platform reliability
- Millions in annual development costs eliminated
Operational Excellence
- 60% reduction in production incidents year-over-year
- 1,000+ security vulnerabilities remediated
- 50% reduction in weekly application errors
By taking ownership of Ruby on Rails, React, Java, and Elixir applications, we enabled the client's team to build new services in modern languages, dramatically improving employee satisfaction and business capabilities. The improved platform stability directly contributed to the significant sales conversion increase.
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