You can’t modernize what you can’t see. Most organizations don’t have a complete, current view of their application portfolio. Systems accumulate through growth, acquisitions, and tactical decisions. Ownership becomes unclear, usage declines, duplicate capabilities emerge, and maintenance costs continue long after the original business need has changed. Before making modernization decisions, organizations need a clear understanding of what they own, …
Learn a practical four-step framework for legacy system assessment, application portfolio prioritization, and modernization planning. Build an executable roadmap that reduces risk and aligns technology investments with business goals.
2026 digital transformation statistics: market sizing across leading research firms, industry adoption rates, ROI benchmarks, enterprise vs. mid-market patterns, and how agentic AI is changing transformation delivery economics.
Many legacy modernization projects start with a simple question: what does this thing actually do?
In this project, we were modernizing a decades-old Delphi application with limited documentation, no meaningful test coverage, engineers long since moved on, and significant unknowns about the environment in which it operated.
Modernizing legacy systems is challenging, particularly when documentation is limited and system knowledge has been lost over time. When LLMs and AI are applied thoughtfully, they can help teams understand legacy systems faster and reduce modernization risk.
This article focuses on how we used LLMs to understand, document, and de-risk an unfamiliar legacy system before modernization began. Once the application was understood and the architecture was defined, the team leveraged AI-assisted development workflows to accelerate the Delphi-to-.NET rewrite itself. Evan Sanning shares that side of the project in his companion article, How We Used LLMs to Rewrite a Legacy Delphi Application in C#.
2026 legacy modernization trends: market size data, growth rates, regional breakdowns, and industry adoption stats from 8+ analyst sources.