Your hardware is market-leading.
Your software is the problem.

Application modernization transforms an existing system — its architecture, technology stack, user interface, and deployment model — to meet current business requirements. Unlike custom development, which starts from a blank canvas, modernization begins with a working system that serves real customers today. The core challenge isn't building something new — it's replacing something that's running without disrupting the people who depend on it. This means parallel operation, phased migration, and deep understanding of business logic that may span a decade of accumulated decisions.

"Works fine" is often the most expensive phrase in enterprise software. A system can be functional today and still represent growing risk: developers who maintain it approaching retirement, a technology stack that no longer receives security updates, end customers expecting mobile and cloud access you can't deliver, and compliance frameworks like NIS2 that your current architecture wasn't designed to meet.

The question isn't whether your software works today — it's whether it will still serve your customers and your business in three to five years. Companies that modernize proactively choose their timeline. Companies that wait have it chosen for them.

More common than most companies admit. Partial migrations, abandoned prototypes, consultants who delivered roadmaps but no running software — these are familiar starting points for us. A stalled modernization isn't a failure of your team or your ambition. It's usually a failure of approach: the scope was too ambitious for a single phase, the existing system wasn't understood deeply enough, or the migration strategy didn't account for parallel operation.

Our Discovery phase is specifically designed to assess where previous attempts went wrong and build an execution plan that addresses those gaps. We start from where you are — not from where a previous partner assumed you'd be.

Your internal developers are central to the entire process — not sidelined by it. They join the modernization team from day one, contributing the domain knowledge and system understanding that no external partner can replicate. Our engineers work alongside yours in the same workflows, same code repositories, same daily standups. Over the course of the engagement, natural knowledge transfer occurs: your team absorbs modern architecture patterns, cloud deployment practices, and CI/CD workflows while building the new system together with us. The goal is full ownership by your team when the modernization is complete.

This is the central design principle of our entire approach. We never do big-bang rewrites or overnight switches. Instead, we run the legacy and modernized systems in parallel, migrating functionality module by module and user group by user group. Each migration step is validated before the next begins. Your end customers experience gradual improvement — faster interfaces, new capabilities, mobile access — without ever facing a jarring transition or data loss. The legacy system remains fully operational until the modernized system has been proven in production.

Undocumented business logic is one of the biggest risks in any modernization project — and one of the reasons Discovery is non-negotiable. During Discovery, we combine code analysis, developer interviews, and end-user workflow mapping to surface rules and behaviors that exist only in the codebase or in your team's institutional memory. We document these systematically and validate them with your domain experts before any modernization work begins. This process typically uncovers a significant number of business rules that weren't captured in any existing specification — rules that would have caused critical issues if missed during rebuilding.

We're technology-agnostic — the right stack depends on your application, your team's capabilities, your infrastructure, and your long-term maintenance requirements. We have deep experience with modern cloud-native architectures, containerization, microservices and modular monoliths, modern frontend frameworks, CI/CD automation, and API-first design. The technology decision happens during the Execution Architecture phase, after Discovery has established what your system needs to become — not before.

Every modernization engagement begins with your reality — your current infrastructure, your data residency requirements, your compliance obligations, and your internal IT policies. We are GDPR-native and NIS2-ready by design. If your data must remain on-premise or within specific jurisdictions, we architect accordingly. We don't prescribe a technology stack and ask you to adapt — we design the modernization path that respects your constraints while achieving your goals.

Discovery is a focused one-to-two-week engagement where our team embeds with yours to build a comprehensive understanding of your current application, its architecture, its dependencies, your end-customer workflows, and your business goals. It's an intensive collaborative process that surfaces undocumented business rules, identifies technical risks, and establishes a shared vocabulary between our team and yours.

Discovery exists because the most expensive mistakes in modernization happen when teams start building before they fully understand what they're replacing. It's an insurance policy — and it often pays for itself by preventing months of rework.

We use milestone-based pricing — you pay when defined deliverables ship, not when hours accumulate. This means our financial incentives are aligned with yours: delivering working software efficiently, not extending timelines. After the Discovery phase, we provide a phased execution plan with clear milestones, team composition, and cost structure for each phase. You have full visibility into what you're paying for and what you receive at each stage. There are no hourly billing surprises.

Every application is different, but modernization of a complex, business-critical system unfolds across multiple phases. The critical difference from traditional projects is that value delivery begins early and continues throughout. After a focused Discovery phase of one to two weeks, we establish a phased execution plan that delivers working modules incrementally — not a single release after years of development.

Your customers see improvements progressively. Your business sees risk decrease with every completed phase. The total timeline depends on application complexity, integrations, end-customer migration requirements, and how much business logic is documented versus embedded in tribal knowledge.

Success in modernization isn't just "the new system is live." We define measurable outcomes at the start of every engagement, aligned to your specific goals. Typical criteria include: end-customer adoption rates on the new platform, system uptime during and after migration, reduction in maintenance overhead for your internal team, compliance certification readiness, deployment frequency improvements, and — critically — your team's ability to independently develop and maintain the modernized system after the engagement concludes.

You can. But consider: hiring experienced cloud architects and modernization engineers in the DACH region takes 4–6 months. Onboarding and aligning them takes another 3. You're looking at nearly a year before meaningful progress, and you'll be managing a transformation program — which is not your core competency. We bring a team that's already done this, with established processes, proven architecture patterns, and the ability to work alongside your existing developers from day one. You get to production faster, at lower risk, without permanently increasing headcount for a temporary need.

Five things: Pay-on-delivery pricing — you pay for delivered milestones, not hours. Discovery-first process: we invest 1–2 weeks understanding your system before proposing anything, which kills assumptions that would have become expensive mistakes. Team continuity: under 5% developer turnover; the engineer who starts your project finishes it. Data sovereignty by default: on-premise, GDPR-native, NIS2-ready. And product expertise — we understand release cycles, end-customer impact, and how to modernize without disrupting a live customer base. We don't need six months to learn your domain.

It matters significantly. DACH-based companies operate under specific data protection regulations (GDPR, NIS2), have distinct expectations around Planungssicherheit — the predictability and thoroughness of project planning — and often require that development partners understand both the regulatory landscape and the cultural context of doing business in the region. A modernization partner who treats compliance as an afterthought or who doesn't understand the importance of structured, reliable project delivery will create more risk than they resolve. Our operations, processes, and contractual models are built for this market.

A 30-minute Value Assessment Call. No pitch. No slides. We ask about your current application, your team, your customers, and what's not working. You ask us anything. By the end, we'll both know whether modernization makes sense for your situation — and if it does, we'll propose Discovery as the next step. Some companies learn they're not ready yet. Others discover the path is clearer than they expected. Either way, you leave with more clarity.

That's exactly what Discovery is for. It's a low-commitment, fixed-price engagement designed to give you clarity. You'll know what's possible, what it realistically costs, and what the timeline looks like — whether you move forward with us or not. The worst-case outcome of Discovery is that you have a professional assessment of your application and a clear recommendation. Most clients find that valuable regardless of what they decide next.

Nothing formal. If you can describe your current application, who uses it, what's frustrating about it, and what you wish it could do — that's more than enough for a productive first conversation. We don't need technical documentation or architecture diagrams upfront. We've had excellent first calls with CTOs who brought detailed system inventories and equally productive ones with CEOs who simply said, "our software is 15 years old and our customers are complaining." Both are valid starting points.