The acceleration of digital life in recent years has made applications gain unprecedented importance. Today, consumers carry out their commercial transactions and even their daily life operations through their cell phones. From the point of view of organizations, this phenomenon generates two requirements:
1. On one hand, the need to continually evolve the applications so that they are up to date and ideally, one step ahead in terms of user experience.
2. On the other hand, ensuring that the applications that employees interact with are user-friendly, intuitive and offer a similar level of experience to the one achieved with their personal apps.
This represents a huge challenge, especially for companies that have legacy systems with many years of operation, because although they prove to meet the expected functionality, they also represent an obstacle on the road to digital transformation: they often have difficulty integrating with new technologies (including some at this point as popular and necessary as cloud, not to mention more advanced issues such as artificial intelligence or advanced data analytics tools), they are difficult to maintain, and the fact of adding a small additional feature (something as simple as a new field in a customer’s registration) can represent a real headache.
Application modernization, therefore, becomes a continuous improvement process that has at least these benefits:
- More agility. A modern application makes it possible to respond quickly to new market demands. In addition, it is likely to rely on open technologies that enable quick innovations and better integration with emerging concepts, such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality or IoT.
- Less risk. The longer it takes to modernize an application, the greater the risk that some of the technologies involved will become obsolete. This has additional costs: lack of technical support that results in poorer performance or security vulnerabilities, greater difficulties to maintain it and huge barriers for future modernizations.
- Controlled costs. Hosting applications in the cloud makes it possible to predict maintenance costs more accurately, with no surprises or hidden costs.
- Future perspective. Linked to the previous point, modern applications have the flexibility, adaptability and resilience to ensure their operation in the medium and long term.
- Better response time. Modernization attacks all the performance bottlenecks that an application suffers throughout its useful life. This allows the company to achieve higher levels of productivity and efficiency.
- Maximum quality. The modernization of an application also involves a code review, so that previous operating errors are detected and optimized on time.
- Increased security. By keeping it up to date, security gaps related to the application are reduced.
- Better customer experience. This is, perhaps, the main benefit of modernizing applications: customers have access to applications that are visually attractive, user-friendly and intuitive from a functional point of view, with surprising details and that work with maximum performance.
The good news: today, modernizing applications does not have to be a headache. Tools such as Nubiral’s App Evolution allow this task to be carried out, starting with an initial survey of the technologies and processes involved in an organization’s day-to-day operations and identifying each of the flows or processes to be improved. Thus, it allows legacy solutions, often difficult to upgrade, to evolve in a simpler way.
The future is moving at full speed. And companies seem to have no choice but to keep up with modernity.