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Enterprise Modernisation Consulting

Legacy System Modernisation Services

We partner with enterprises to transform mainframe, COBOL, VB6, .NET Framework, and legacy Java environments into maintainable, cloud-ready platforms - without disrupting the business operations that depend on them. Our assessment-led approach ensures every modernisation decision is grounded in code-level evidence, not assumptions.

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500+
Enterprise Clients
10,000+
Engineers Deployed
50+
Countries Served
99.4%
CSAT Score
48h
Team Assembly

The Challenge

Legacy Systems Are Becoming an Existential Risk

The average enterprise carries 20 to 30 years of accumulated technical debt across systems that were never designed to integrate with modern cloud platforms, mobile channels, or data analytics pipelines. Skills to maintain these systems are retiring faster than they can be replaced, and the cost of operating ageing infrastructure is consuming budget that should fund competitive differentiation.

72%
of enterprise IT budgets consumed by legacy maintenance
60%
of COBOL developers expected to retire by 2030
$3.8T
annual global cost of legacy system technical debt
4x
higher incident rate in legacy systems vs modernised platforms

Why QuickHire

Why Enterprises Choose QuickHire

01

Assessment-First Methodology

Every engagement begins with automated code analysis before any migration work starts. This eliminates the underestimation that causes modernisation programmes to overrun.

02

Strangler Fig Expertise

Our engineers have executed strangler fig migrations at scale across mainframe, monolith, and legacy SOA environments. We know where the pattern breaks down and how to prevent it.

03

Business Logic Archaeology

We extract and formally document undocumented business rules before migration begins, preserving institutional knowledge that would otherwise be lost. This catalogue becomes a permanent organisational asset.

04

Continuity-First Delivery

Production rollback procedures are operational for a minimum of 30 days post-cutover on every migration we execute. Business continuity is a delivery constraint, not a nice-to-have.

05

Automated Reconciliation

We build reconciliation frameworks that compare outputs from legacy and modernised systems in parallel, providing mathematical proof of equivalence before any legacy system is decommissioned.

06

Structured Knowledge Transfer

Pair programming, architecture decision records, and hands-on workshops ensure your internal team can operate the modernised system independently. We measure knowledge transfer success, not just delivery metrics.

Challenges

Common Enterprise Pain Points

01

Undocumented Business Logic

Decades of business rules have been encoded directly into COBOL programs, stored procedures, and VB6 modules without corresponding specifications. When the developers who wrote these systems retire, that knowledge disappears with them, making any modernisation attempt a high-risk reverse-engineering exercise.

02

Big-Bang Rewrite Failure Risk

The history of enterprise software is littered with failed full-rewrite programmes that ran years over schedule and were ultimately cancelled without delivering a production system. The temptation to start fresh invariably underestimates the volume of edge cases and business rules embedded in the legacy system.

03

Integration Web Complexity

Enterprise legacy systems typically sit at the centre of a web of 30 to 100 integration touchpoints involving flat-file feeds, proprietary socket protocols, and SOAP services. Modernising the core system without disrupting all of these consumers simultaneously is a coordination challenge that derails many programmes.

04

Skill Scarcity

The pool of engineers with both deep COBOL or VB6 knowledge and modern cloud architecture expertise is extremely small. Without both skill sets on the same team, modernisation programmes either fail to accurately interpret the legacy system or produce modernised code that repeats the same architectural mistakes.

05

Regulatory and Audit Trail Requirements

Financial services, healthcare, and government organisations must demonstrate that the modernised system produces identical outputs to the legacy system for audit and regulatory compliance purposes. This requires a formal reconciliation methodology that most system integrators do not have the tooling to execute.

Our Approach

A Structured, Evidence-Based Modernisation Programme

Our legacy modernisation methodology combines automated code intelligence, structured business logic extraction, and an incremental migration approach that keeps existing systems operational throughout the transformation. We calibrate the migration strategy - re-engineer, rewrite, or retire - for each application component based on objective assessment data, not vendor sales incentives.

01
Automated Code Intelligence
We deploy static analysis and dependency mapping tools to produce a complete picture of every component, data flow, and integration point before migration planning begins.
02
Incremental Migration Architecture
We design the migration sequence to deliver business value incrementally, with each phase producing a production-ready deliverable rather than accumulating work for a single high-risk release.
03
Parallel-Run Reconciliation
Legacy and modernised systems run concurrently with automated output comparison until equivalence is proven across a statistically significant sample of real production transactions.
04
Embedded Knowledge Transfer
Our engineers pair with your internal team throughout delivery, ensuring that architecture decisions are understood and your team can operate the modernised platform independently from day one of go-live.

Delivery Models

How We Deliver

Assessment and Roadmap

A time-boxed discovery engagement producing a full application inventory, technical debt quantification, re-engineer vs rewrite vs retire recommendation, and a phased modernisation roadmap with effort and risk estimates.

Timeline
4-6 weeks
Team Size
2-3 architects
Incremental Modernisation

Ongoing delivery programme using the strangler fig pattern to migrate application components slice by slice, with each slice validated in production before the next begins. Suitable for business-critical systems that cannot tolerate a production freeze.

Timeline
6-36 months
Team Size
4-10 engineers
Accelerated Replatform

A time-compressed programme for systems with lower business logic complexity where containerisation, runtime upgrade, or cloud lift-and-shift can be executed with automated tooling and a shorter parallel-run window.

Timeline
8-16 weeks
Team Size
3-6 engineers

Capabilities

Technical Capability Matrix

Mainframe and COBOL
COBOL to Java transpilationJCL modernisationBatch-to-cloud migrationIBM DB2 migrationCICS transaction modernisation
.NET and Windows Legacy
.NET Framework to .NET 8 upgradeVB6 to C# rewriteWCF to REST/gRPC migrationCOM component replacementClassic ASP to modern stack
Java Legacy
Java EE to Spring BootJBoss/WebLogic migrationEJB decompositionSOAP to REST conversionMonolith-to-microservices
Database and Integration
Stored procedure extractionSchema modernisationETL pipeline migrationFlat-file to API migrationOracle Forms migration

Engagement Models

How We Engage

Choose the model that fits your programme governance, budget cycle, and team structure.

01

Staff Augmentation

Engineers embed directly under your management.

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02

Dedicated Developers

Full-time team aligned to your product roadmap.

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03

Managed Teams

End-to-end delivery with SLA-backed outcomes.

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04

Engineering Pods

Autonomous cross-functional pods per domain.

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05

Offshore Dev Centre

Permanent engineering base in India. Full IP ownership.

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06

Build-Operate-Transfer

We build and run it. You take ownership on schedule.

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Our Process

From Discovery to Delivery

1

Discovery Kickoff

Day 1

We deploy automated scanning tools against the legacy codebase and conduct structured interviews with business stakeholders and system owners to establish the programme baseline.

2

Assessment and Inventory

Weeks 1-3

Automated analysis produces dependency graphs, complexity scores, and integration maps. We produce a re-engineer vs rewrite vs retire recommendation for each application component.

3

Roadmap and Architecture Design

Weeks 3-5

We produce the migration sequencing plan, target architecture design, reconciliation framework specification, and integration contract definitions. Stakeholders review and approve before delivery begins.

4

Incremental Migration Delivery

Weeks 6 onward

Engineering teams migrate components in the agreed sequence. Each component goes through automated reconciliation and user acceptance testing before cutover. Rollback procedures remain active throughout.

5

Hypercare and Handover

Ongoing

A structured 90-day hypercare period with defined SLA response times follows each major cutover. Knowledge transfer is completed and the client team operates the modernised system independently.

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Security & Compliance

Enterprise-Grade Security by Default

✓ISO 27001 Certified✓SOC 2 Type II Ready✓GDPR Compliant✓DPDP Act Ready✓NDA on Day 1✓MSA Available✓IP Assignment Clauses✓Escrow Options

Governance

Programme Governance

✓

Architecture Decision Records

Every significant design choice is documented in a version-controlled architecture decision record that captures the context, options considered, and rationale for the selected approach.

✓

Fortnightly Programme Review

A programme dashboard covering scope, schedule, budget, risk, and quality dimensions is updated fortnightly and reviewed with the client's delivery leads to maintain alignment.

✓

Monthly Steering Committee

Senior stakeholders from both the client and our practice leadership review programme health, make scope decisions, and approve risk mitigations on a monthly cadence.

✓

Independent Quarterly Health Check

A senior architect outside the delivery team conducts an independent quarterly review of the programme and reports findings directly to the client's steering committee.

Team Structure

Your Enterprise Team

Our modernisation teams are composed of engineers with demonstrable experience in both the legacy platform being migrated and the target modern architecture. We do not place consultants who have only read about COBOL on COBOL modernisation programmes. Team composition is adjusted each quarter based on the skills required by the active migration workstreams.

✓Programme Director
✓Principal Modernisation Architect
✓COBOL and Mainframe Engineer
✓.NET Migration Specialist
✓Java Migration Engineer
✓Database Architect
✓DevOps and Platform Engineer
✓QA and Reconciliation Engineer

Project Lifecycle

From Kickoff to Production

01
4-6 weeks

Discovery and Assessment

Application inventory, dependency maps, technical debt report, re-engineer vs rewrite vs retire recommendations, risk register.

02
2-3 weeks

Architecture and Roadmap

Target architecture design, migration sequence plan, integration contract specifications, reconciliation framework design, programme plan.

03
4-6 weeks

Foundation Build

Target platform infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, automated reconciliation framework, feature flag infrastructure, monitoring and observability stack.

04
Ongoing phases

Incremental Migration

Migrated application components, reconciliation reports, integration adapters, updated business rules catalogue, test evidence packs.

05
Ongoing

Cutover and Hypercare

Production go-live, rollback procedures, operational runbooks, knowledge transfer completion, 90-day hypercare support.

Case Studies

Enterprise Outcomes

Financial Services

A tier-1 bank needed to decommission a 35-year-old COBOL core banking system processing 4 million transactions daily without disrupting retail operations.

We implemented a strangler fig migration over 28 months, running parallel reconciliation across all transaction types with automated discrepancy alerting before each component cutover.

99.99%transaction reconciliation accuracy at cutover
Government

A national government agency was running a VB6 benefits processing system on Windows XP hardware that could no longer be patched or insured.

We completed a full rewrite to a .NET 8 web application over 18 months using the business rules catalogue approach, achieving identical output across 100% of historical test cases.

$12Mannual infrastructure cost eliminated
Insurance

An insurance carrier legacy Java EE policy administration system on WebLogic was blocking the launch of a new digital distribution channel.

We decomposed the monolith into 14 domain-bounded microservices over 12 months, enabling the digital channel launch in month 8 while migration continued in parallel.

6xfaster feature delivery velocity post-modernisation

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Hiring Models

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Frequently Asked Questions

Our modernisation practice covers a broad spectrum of legacy platforms including IBM mainframe applications written in COBOL, PL/I, and Assembler, as well as Visual Basic 6 desktop applications, classic ASP and COM-based systems, .NET Framework 2.0 through 4.8 applications, and legacy Java EE deployments on JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere. We also handle RPG on IBM AS/400 iSeries environments and Oracle Forms applications. Each engagement begins with an automated inventory scan to catalogue every component, dependency, and integration point before any migration work begins.
We use a structured assessment framework that scores each application across four dimensions: business criticality, technical debt density, change frequency, and integration complexity. Applications scoring high on business criticality but low on change frequency are typically strong candidates for a lift-and-shift containerisation approach. Those with high change frequency and dense technical debt are evaluated for a strangler fig incremental rewrite. Applications with low business value and duplicated capability elsewhere are flagged for retirement. This evidence-based approach prevents the common failure mode of committing to a full rewrite before understanding the true scope of the system.
The strangler fig pattern involves building new, modern components alongside the legacy system and progressively routing traffic from the old system to the new one until the legacy application can be safely decommissioned. We recommend this approach when the legacy system is actively used in production, when business continuity is non-negotiable, and when the target architecture is significantly different from the source. It is particularly effective for mainframe-to-cloud migrations and monolith-to-microservices decompositions because it eliminates the big-bang release risk. Each slice of functionality is validated independently before the next slice begins, giving stakeholders clear progress visibility and an escape hatch at every stage.
Our mainframe modernisation methodology preserves existing JCL job streams and batch schedules during the transition period through a parallel-run approach where both the legacy mainframe and the modernised platform execute the same workloads and outputs are automatically reconciled. We use automated COBOL-to-Java or COBOL-to-C# transpilation tooling as a starting point, followed by a mandatory human review pass to correct semantic drift and remove dead code paths. Critical batch jobs are migrated one at a time with a defined rollback window. We maintain the mainframe in a read-only shadow state until reconciliation pass rates exceed 99.97% for a minimum of four consecutive business cycles.
We deploy a combination of static analysis platforms including SonarQube Enterprise, Understand by Scientific Toolworks, and CAST Highlight to produce dependency graphs, cyclomatic complexity heat maps, and technical debt quantification reports. For mainframe environments, we use Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer to parse COBOL copybooks and map data flows across programs. For .NET Framework systems, we use the Microsoft .NET Upgrade Assistant combined with custom Roslyn analysers that flag APIs removed in .NET 8. The combined output is aggregated into an executive-level modernisation roadmap with effort estimates, risk scores, and recommended sequencing.
Engagement duration varies significantly based on system complexity and the chosen migration strategy. A targeted .NET Framework to .NET 8 upgrade for a mid-sized application typically takes 10 to 16 weeks. A VB6 to modern web stack rewrite for a line-of-business application runs 20 to 36 weeks depending on UI complexity. Full mainframe decommissioning programmes for large enterprises commonly span 18 to 36 months and are structured as a series of quarterly delivery phases. We provide granular timeline estimates only after completing the discovery and assessment phase, as premature estimates made without code-level analysis are a leading cause of modernisation project failures.
Business continuity is treated as a primary constraint rather than an afterthought. We establish a change freeze window with stakeholders for each migrated component, schedule cutovers during low-traffic periods, and maintain fully operational rollback procedures for a minimum of 30 days post-cutover. Integration contracts between the legacy system and downstream consumers are formalised as versioned API specifications before any migration work begins, ensuring that consuming systems continue to function without modification. We also implement feature flag infrastructure so that specific capabilities can be toggled between the old and new implementation paths at runtime if anomalies are detected in production.
Our modernisation practice is cloud-agnostic and supports migration to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. For containerised workloads, we target Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine. For serverless transformation of batch processing, we leverage AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Run depending on the client's existing cloud footprint. We also support private cloud targets based on VMware Tanzu and Red Hat OpenShift for organisations with data residency or regulatory constraints that preclude public cloud deployment. Target cloud selection is driven by the client's existing vendor relationships, licensing positions, and operational capability.
Undocumented business logic is one of the highest-risk elements of any modernisation programme and we address it through a combination of automated extraction and structured knowledge elicitation. Our code archaeology process uses static analysis to identify decision trees, conditional branches, and calculation routines that lack corresponding specification documents. These are then reviewed with subject matter experts from the client business teams to validate the intended behaviour and create formal acceptance criteria. We build a living business rules catalogue in a version-controlled repository that serves as both the specification for the modernised system and the regression test basis. This catalogue becomes a permanent organisational asset that outlasts the modernisation programme itself.
We implement a three-layer validation strategy. At the unit level, we extract test cases from production execution logs and dead code analysis to achieve baseline coverage of all reachable code paths in the legacy system before migration begins. At the integration level, we replay historical transaction logs against both the legacy and modernised systems simultaneously and perform automated output reconciliation to detect semantic differences. At the user acceptance level, we configure shadow traffic routing so that a percentage of live production requests are processed by both systems in parallel with results compared in real time. Discrepancies are categorised as blocking or non-blocking based on business impact and tracked to resolution before any production cutover is authorised.
Legacy applications frequently rely on tightly coupled database structures including stored procedures, triggers, and denormalised schemas that encode business logic in the data layer. Our database modernisation workstream runs concurrently with the application workstream and begins with a schema analysis to classify each stored procedure as pure data access, business logic, or transformation logic. Business logic is extracted into the application tier during the modernisation process. For schema migration, we use AWS Database Migration Service, Azure Database Migration Service, or Flyway depending on the source and target database engines. We also implement bidirectional replication between the legacy and modernised schemas during the parallel-run phase to ensure both systems remain consistent.
Yes, and we recommend this approach for most enterprise engagements because halting feature development during a multi-year modernisation programme is commercially unacceptable. We establish a branching strategy and integration protocol with the client's internal team at the outset of the programme so that new features developed against the legacy codebase can be cleanly incorporated into the modernised target. For greenfield features developed during the programme, we advise building them directly against the modernised architecture and using the strangler fig pattern to back-integrate them into the legacy system on a temporary basis if needed. This parallel development model requires disciplined API contract management which we establish and govern throughout the engagement.
For programmes spanning more than six months, we establish a dedicated programme management office structure comprising a programme director, technical architect, delivery leads per workstream, and a client-side steering committee. Progress is tracked against a programme roadmap updated fortnightly with completion metrics tied to code migration percentage, test coverage percentage, and outstanding defect counts. We hold monthly steering committee reviews at which we present a red-amber-green status dashboard covering scope, schedule, budget, risk, and quality dimensions. Decision logs, architecture decision records, and risk registers are maintained in a shared programme repository accessible to all stakeholders. We also conduct independent quarterly health checks with a senior architect outside the delivery team to provide objective programme assurance.
Legacy systems commonly expose flat-file feeds, proprietary socket protocols, or dated SOAP services consumed by dozens of upstream and downstream systems. We begin by producing a comprehensive integration inventory that maps every inbound and outbound data flow, the consuming system, the data format, and the update frequency. Modern API facades are placed in front of the legacy integration points during the transition period so that consuming systems can be migrated to the new interface on their own schedule rather than requiring a synchronised cutover. For flat-file integrations that cannot be changed due to third-party constraints, we implement adapter components in the modernised architecture that produce the legacy format as an output while the internal data model follows modern standards.
Legacy systems are disproportionately represented in enterprise vulnerability inventories because they pre-date modern security practices and frequently cannot be patched without disrupting business-critical operations. Modernisation directly addresses this by eliminating end-of-life runtimes and frameworks, replacing proprietary authentication mechanisms with OIDC and OAuth 2.0, and restructuring data access patterns to enforce least-privilege database credentials. We also introduce secrets management using HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager to replace hardcoded credentials that are a near-universal finding in legacy codebases. Post-modernisation systems are subjected to a penetration test and SAST scan before production deployment, with findings tracked to closure as part of the programme acceptance criteria.
We include a structured knowledge transfer programme as a formal deliverable in every engagement, not an afterthought. This comprises pair programming sessions between our engineers and the client's internal team throughout the delivery phase, architecture decision records explaining every significant design choice, runbooks for all operational procedures, and a hands-on workshop series covering the modernised technology stack. Post go-live, we offer a 90-day hypercare support period with defined SLA response times during which the client team operates the modernised system with our engineers available for escalation. At the end of hypercare, clients have the option to transition to a retained advisory arrangement for ongoing architectural guidance or to operate fully independently.
Industries
Financial ServicesInsuranceGovernmentHealthcareManufacturing