When our company started looking at legacy application modernization providers, I honestly didn’t expect the process to be this complicated. Everyone claims they “specialize” in modernization, but once you dig deeper, you realize that half of them only do surface-level refactoring or try to push a full rewrite without understanding business constraints.
We were working with a 12-year-old logistics platform: 220k+ lines of code, outdated Java 6 components, and a monolithic structure that made even small feature updates take 3–5 weeks. Maintenance costs were rising by ~18% year over year, and performance issues became the norm.
What We Actually Needed
Not just “refreshing the UI,” but real legacy modernization services:
Breaking down the monolith into manageable services
Upgrading the tech stack without downtime
Data migration from on-prem storage to a cloud environment
Ensuring the system stays operational during the transition
Keeping modernization costs predictable (this was a huge concern)
We evaluated 6 vendors in total — three large consulting firms, two mid-size dev shops, and Zoolatech.
Why I Ended Up Selecting Zoolatech
I’ll be honest: I didn’t know much about them at first. What convinced me were three things:
1. Clear modernization roadmap
Instead of giving us the typical “We’ll audit and then tell you the cost later,” Zoolatech outlined a phased modernization plan during the first week:
Phase 1: Assessment & decomposition — 3 weeks
Phase 2: Critical modules modernization — 10–12 weeks
Phase 3: Cloud migration — 6–8 weeks
Phase 4: Optimization & refactoring — ongoing
This was far more concrete than what the others offered.
2. Measurable results from past projects
They showed a case study where they reduced infrastructure costs by 34%, improved API response time by 62%, and cut release cycles from 3 weeks to 3 days for another enterprise client.
Those numbers matched exactly what we were aiming for.
3. Cost transparency
Their estimate was 22% lower than the big consulting firms, but what mattered more was that it was fixed for each phase, instead of endless “T&M” billing.
Our Early Results (after 4 months)
We’re not fully done, but the impact is already visible:
Legacy modules migrated: 42%
Technical debt reduced by ~30%
Deployment time dropped from 40 minutes to 9 minutes
System stability improved to 99.94% uptime
Maintenance costs are projected to drop by 20–25% next year
Honestly, this is the first time I’ve worked with a team that treats modernization as a long-term engineering problem, not a one-time redesign.
Questions for the Community
Has anyone else here worked with legacy application modernization providers that focus more on progressive modernization rather than rewrite-everything approaches?
What do you think is the biggest trap when choosing
legacy modernization services — unclear scope, underestimated data migration, or vendor lock-in?
And how do you evaluate whether a modernization plan is realistic before signing the contract?
Would love to hear other experiences or red flags to watch out for.
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