Fast changing business dynamics drives organizations to consider application modernization strategy as paramount importance. Fast pace technological advancement inspires technical community to explore new discoveries. Companies reserve significant budget to refurbish their legacy software that realized through modernizing the platform, refactoring the tech stacks or even purchasing. Depending on industry, target market, application scalability, reliability and other factors, organisations identify impactful areas like market share, revenue, differentiated customer experience, and more.
The popular motives behind app modernization is operational efficiency, cost saving, improving customer experience, reliability, and enhancing security. There are instances where legacy technologies with increasing technical debt also influence to initiate transformation.The best way to identify the technology obsoleteness is keeping watch on growing number of technical debts. The steep increase in that metrics is clear indicator of the need to modernize the application. Financial constraint, workload, delivery pressure, and resistance to change are the topmost challenges companies face to undertake modernization.
During 2001-2010
First decade of this century, industry seen spike in web sites and web application development predominantly using client server technologies. Here is an informative website to explore the timeline of milestones in the history of web design from 1990 to the present. Web site and applications have been in continuous journey of transformation ever since. MVC pattern, Web2.0. Portal, service oriented architecture design and automation have been the biggest drivers of modernization during 2000-2009.
During 2011-2020
Second decade saw rise in cloud technologies and mobile apps. Usecases for smart devices disrupted the market. IT infrastructure moved from owned data centers to cloud. Application deployment transformed from physical servers to virtual servers and ultimately found place in containers. Application architecture transformed itself from monolithic to multi layer and eventually to microservices. Development process focus moved away from water fall to agile and then to DevOps. Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Openshift made cloud native development process possible.
The heavy weight application servers like Websphere and Weblogic were replaced with lighter and faster servers. With huge data generation, development of distributed systems took limelight. Application integration shifted from SOAP to REST API and distributed publisher subscriber mechanism like Kafka. There was a paradigm shift in software development process with DevOps taking centerstage. Big data and data analytics created churn in the market to drive digital transformation.
What's Next
With rising numbers of internet users, a trend accelerated by the pandemic, various factors have surfaced to influence companies.
- The increased online transactions and digital payment
- Remote work required better collaboration with virtual meeting infrastructure
- Ever increasing cyber security concerns and fraud prevention
- Hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Growing online education market
- Faster AI adoption and AIOps
- Scalability and reliability with infrastructure
Technological transformation this decade probably going to be driven from likes of AI, Blockchain, gRPC, HTTP2, Data Fabric, Data streaming, 5G, and Quantum technologies. R&D on these niche areas shows hundreds of new successful usecases as well. Many leading technology companies have already adopted, and the trend is showing clear path to others.
