IT leaders are being asked to modernize mission-critical ERP systems while investing in innovation — all without increasing IT budgets. These demands, handed down by boards and C-suite executives, are necessary to meet if organizations want to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive and tech-driven landscape. Yet, they’re also in direct conflict with one another.
Though legacy applications are often stable, highly customized and full of valuable data, a Gartner® report notes they can introduce friction points that hinder business agility and velocity.1 These aging systems aren’t designed to keep up with today’s business needs, prompting organizations to “rip and replace” with newer versions of the same software. However, this approach is costly, risky and disruptive, draining resources and forcing teams to put strategic initiatives on hold — sometimes indefinitely.
Bringing existing systems up to date without hindering innovation is a key factor in organizational success, and continuous modernization can serve as an effective strategy.
Overcoming IT challenges through continuous modernization
Addressing today’s IT challenges — namely, budget constraints and development hurdles — requires a shift in mindset. Though organizations should modernize legacy systems, discarding them in favor of new solutions isn’t the only or best way forward. Rather than defaulting to the rip-and-replace approach, IT leaders need to adopt a more strategic and nuanced perspective that factors in the organization’s specific needs and goals.
That’s where continuous modernization comes into play.
Implementing this model helps IT leaders change how they view legacy systems — from a problem that must be eliminated to an asset that can be optimized for better business outcomes. It encourages them to look deeper into the friction points caused by mature applications and handle them accordingly.
In “Use Continuous Modernization to Optimize Legacy Applications,” the research report that covers this concept in depth, Gartner suggests alternatives to replacing whole applications, including:
- Optimizing parts of the system discovered to be the source of obstacles
- Using APIs to gain access to desired features and improve data accessibility
- Substituting components with newer technologies for enhanced functionality
By applying a step-by-step process to analyze the friction points caused by legacy systems, IT leaders can determine the best course of action to gain the capabilities needed to improve business operations — component replacement, encapsulation, refactoring or replatforming.
Continuous modernization enables existing applications to transform from monolithic platforms that must be upgraded every few years to composable systems that can quickly and easily adapt to business needs.
Owning the IT roadmap and strategy
One advantage of continuous modernization is that it can help put budget and decision-making power back in the organization’s hands, particularly when backed by a reliable support provider.
Owning the IT roadmap and strategy is critical in today’s highly complex environments, where the demands on IT are at an all-time high. Investing in agentic AI and AI automation projects is a priority to drive innovation and efficiency. Yet, enterprise software vendors are pushing licensees toward costly cloud upgrades with questionable ROI metrics that don’t solve AI challenges or improve workflows or manual processes.
Implementing a composable, continuous modernization strategy coupled with expert support enables IT leaders to:
- Decide when (and if) replatforming is necessary
- Integrate the exact features and functions required
- Eliminate friction points and make operational improvements quickly
- Reallocate funds from massive upgrades to AI and other innovation initiatives
- Free up internal talent to focus on high-priority projects
In short, organizations that take this approach can release themselves from vendor constraints, gaining the flexibility and capacity to optimize IT spend and yield faster ROI.
Leveraging existing systems to power innovation
As a strategic IT partner that recognizes the value of existing enterprise investments, Rimini Street is a strong proponent of continuous modernization. There’s ample evidence that the traditional ERP model is poised for a complete transformation due to the emergence of AI. That’s why our experts agree with industry analysts about developing a composable ERP strategy — a more agile, cost-effective and forward-thinking method of bringing legacy applications up to date.
In fact, Rimini Street has worked with organizations worldwide to not only maximize the potential of their existing systems but also free up IT budgets for high-impact projects.
With Apsen Farmacêutica, Rimini Street helped build and execute a project to automate SAP processes. Rather than undergoing a massive migration to S/4HANA, Apsen retained its SAP ECC 6 instance and modernized the system by integrating ServiceNow workflow automation features. The pharmaceutical manufacturer gained the desired operational capabilities in half the time of standard development timeframes, automating 70% of previously manual processes.
Partnering with Rimini Street also allowed Pacific Textiles to follow its own IT roadmap as opposed to the vendor’s. Having reliable, expert support for its SAP applications made it possible to keep the existing systems and modernize them on the company’s terms and timeline. Meanwhile, the reduction in support costs enabled Pacific Textiles to invest in strategic projects, such as its transition to a new data lake architecture.
In both cases, Rimini Street helped provide the freedom to focus on new, strategic initiatives that produce faster ROI and position the organization for future growth.
Key takeaways
Successful modernization comes from focusing on business objectives and continuously optimizing processes and workflows instead of investing in upgrades and migrations that don’t deliver the desired capabilities or ROI. This enables IT leaders to accelerate innovation on their terms instead of focusing all investment dollars on replatforming. By adopting continuous modernization, IT leaders can enhance existing applications, use them as a springboard to gain more robust business capabilities and reallocate resources to strategic initiatives. Learn how Rimini Street can help maximize the life and value of your mission-critical systems here.
