Legacy Software Modernisation

What is legacy software?

Across the UK, many organisations still rely on legacy IT systems and products, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep these systems running. Skilled personnel are becoming scarcer and replacement hardware is unreliable and expensive. The system security is in doubt and upgrading it all seems daunting.

You probably don’t need us to tell you that legacy systems were designed to work without interacting or exchanging information with other systems. Before the early 2000s, that wasn’t necessarily a problem, but with modern technology moving at break-neck speed, it’s now a major disadvantage.

Is it time to update your legacy applications?

Legacy software modernisation is your first step towards business agility. You’ll be able to respond quickly to market changes, easily produce meaningful reports, have fewer costs and happier staff – think of all the frustrating, time-consuming manual workarounds that will disappear and help them deliver better customer service in less time. Win, win.

Your updated system will also enable you to be a part of recent innovations that are providing significant business value, such as cloud computing, social media, big data and mobile technology.

How we can help you

We know that it’s a big decision to replace your legacy software, and one that you absolutely need to get right for the future of your business.

With Imperial IT you’re in safe hands. As a first step, we’ll spend time with you and your staff to understand your business, what your current system prevents you from doing, and what your new system needs to be able to deliver. This is crucial as the process of modernising your technology is unique to your individual company.

We can then either:

• bring across certain functionality – for example, proprietary business processes or formulas – on to a new system that’s able to interface effectively with newer technologies
• build you a completely new system with the option to “switch off” the old legacy system at the end of the process

Whichever option you choose, we’ll use the very latest, powerful technologies to build a blueprint for a system that drives efficiencies by:

• controlling the input of data
• streamlining how the data flows through the workflow stages
• ensuring that your team completes tasks effectively
• warning you when something appears abnormal
• guiding the user through each task so nothing falls through cracks, is misinterpreted or incorrectly entered

The outcome will be informed management, productive users and happy customers.

Data migration

When upgrading your legacy system, in most cases data in the old system needs to be “migrated” or moved to the new system. In some cases, the data needs to be synchronised between the old and new systems to ensure a side-by-side system rollout can occur. We’re well versed in managing complex data migration scenarios, so you can rely on us to ensure the process goes smoothly.

Process

Starting with the planning stage, our software architecture team delves deep to understand the nuances of your business and how it operates on a day-to-day basis.

This often leads to members of staff highlighting areas of the workflow process that they feel could be improved, as well as any functionality that must stay to enable them to do their job. We take this on board, listening to the management team and your users, adding our own suggestions as we go.

We also spend time thoroughly analysing and documenting your existing system, ensuring no stone is left unturned. In our experience, this is the key to a smooth system changeover; failing to do this results in functionality gaps that may only be spotted once the new system is in place, by which time it’s difficult and costly to rectify. It’s our responsibility to ensure this doesn’t happen.

We then articulate all our findings in writing and create a prototype of the new system to help you visualise how it will look and feeland how it will work, even at this early design stage.

Our “Working With Us” page sets out the process in more detail.

Technology

Imperial IT is a Microsoft Partner, so our technology of choice is ASP.Net MVC5 with HTML5 and C# programming, WPF for desktop/tablet components and WCF Web Services to link systems together. For the database, Imperial IT utilises Microsoft SQL Server, including extensive use of the core Database Engine, Integration, Analysis and Reporting services. We can also work with MySQL systems, if preferred.

If we can help with your legacy software modernisation project, give our team a call on 080 0987 5449.