A modern FRONT-END is the highest-impact, lowest-risk first move for legacy application modernization. It requires no changes to the database, no rewrite of business logic and no infrastructure overhaul. What it requires is the desire to fix what your users see. Forrester quantified the return.
“Every $1 invested in UX yields an average return of $100 — a 9,900% ROI.
“Source: Forrester Research, The Business Impact of Investing In Experience
When legacy applications get new modernized fronts-ends users “feel it”. C-suite feels that they have accomplished something and might even fund the next modernization phase (whatever that is) .
And if the new front-end was created using a No-Code/Low-Code platform it delivers the modern app in days not weeks; weeks not months and most definitely months not years!
“Customers building applications up to 20x faster using Low-Code versus traditional development methods.”
Source: Forrester Total Economic Impact Study, commissioned by Appian
Are there other methodologies that will help to modernize legacy applications? Of course there are and the vast majority of them focus on the BACK-END. If your priorities include a modern tech stack for example migrating to the ,NET environment – ya know, replace DataBasic with C#, JavaScript, etc. definitely do it BUT DO NOT DO IT FIRST. What impact will back-end modernization have on the user-community? What benefit will the user see from the transformation?
If your priorities are MultiValue database integration with other databases, back-office systems or to enterprise software systems (like Salesforce for example) do it BUT save it for later.
Move the app to the cloud? Sure why not but definitely not the first thing in the application modernization scenario!
Do not get me wrong, there are a ton of benefits in modernizing the back-end. They are foundational and need to be built upon. The initial benefits favor the IT department. End-users do not get to see the benefits early in the back-end modernization process.
When you look at the direction of research from Gartner, Forrester and the broader modernization community, a consistent theme emerges: the most successful modernization projects focus on delivering business value quickly while minimizing risk.
Which brings us to an uncomfortable truth.
Users don’t care what database they’re using.
Nobody from accounting walks into work and says, “Thank goodness, IT migrated us from Oracle to UniVerse” although some folks from Rocket…
What they do notice is when a thirty-year-old application suddenly becomes a modern mobile, desktop and/or a web experience.
That’s why UI/UX modernization consistently delivers the highest returns on investment. It provides an immediate, visible improvement to employees, customers, suppliers, and partners experience while preserving the business logic that has been refined over decades. Training becomes easier. Productivity improves. User satisfaction increases. Executives see tangible results without waiting years for a massive transformation project to finish.
And the natural partner to UI/UX modernization is Low-Code/No-Code development.
Analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester have highlighted the rapid growth of Low-Code platforms. Organizations need to deliver applications faster while addressing developer shortages and rising software complexity. Low-Code platforms allow organizations to modernize existing systems, create entirely new apps, and integrate with modern technologies without requiring armies of developers writing every line of code by hand.
Think about it this way. If traditional development is building a house one brick at a time, Low-Code is showing up with most of the walls and roof already assembled. You still get a house, but you get it significantly faster with far fewer opportunities to hit your hand with a hammer.
This doesn’t mean other modernization approaches are unimportant.
API and web service strategies enable integration with modern ecosystems. Reporting and business intelligence modernization unlock valuable data. Cloud migration can improve scalability and resilience. Integration with .NET, Java, AI, and other modern technologies can extend application capabilities. Hybrid modernization approaches allow organizations to evolve systems gradually. Even database transformation and code migration have their place when business requirements demand them.
But if the goal of legacy app modernization is enhancing the User Experience (UI/UX) while maximizing return and minimizing disruption, the evidence points to a clear direction.
Modernize what users see and do it first by using No-Code/Low-Code technologies to accelerate everything that follows.
Because modernization isn’t about replacing decades of investment.
It’s about making those investments look and perform like they were built the day before yesterday.
Drum roll please – it is commercial time! Evoke is the only Low-Code/No-Code Rapid App Development Platform that supports MultiValue. Evoke also supports DB2 and Oracle and SQL Server and its derivatives. Oh and just for the fun of it, Evoke supports Android, iOS, macOS (other Apple derivatives) , Linux and Windows as well.
If you choose to start your modernization process with a product that migrates the back-end programming language to a modern .NET stack, ask what the system does to create the modern UX? They probably do it by hand-coding; some vendors might even be looking at Evoke as a way to streamline their UI/UX development. By the way, Evoke easily integrates the transformed DataBasic to .NET code into Evoke created Visual Studio solutions. And did I say that the VS code is delivered to the developer’s system eliminating vendor lock-in/out. And How about AI. Yup, AI can be fully integrated. Did you know that chatbots were introduced as a supported feature of Evoke way back in 2019? Ya know, in the stone age.
May I repeat, Evoke from BlueFinity International is the ONLY LOW-CODE/NO-CODE Rapid App Development Platform that supports MultiValue. Evoke also supports DB2 and Oracle and SQL Server and its derivatives. I don’t need to relist the OS platforms supported or do I?
Integrate AI agents and Chatbots. Have AI write some .NET, even DataBasic code and add it into your VS project too.
Review: User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) modernization consistently delivers the highest returns on investment. It provides immediate, visible improvement to employees, customers, suppliers and partners experience while preserving the business logic (whether DataBasic, JAVA, others or/and .NET) that has been refined over decades. Training becomes easier. Productivity improves. User satisfaction increases. Executives see tangible results without waiting years for a massive transformation project to finish.
And the natural partner to UI/UX modernization is Low-Code/No-Code development.
Evoke is a Low-Code/No-Code Rapid App Development Platform that creates a modern front- end User Experience (UX) as well as any other Low-Code/No-Code supplier to the general systems marketplace. Evoke does development faster from start to deployment than any other supplier of legacy modernization plus new app development and has the highest ROI of any MultiValue supplier of front-end development tools. To top it off, the Evoke solution delivers new technology stacks that delivers .NET solutions – period! (I know, that is an exclamation point.)