Old software rarely announces that it has become a problem. It keeps working.
Invoices still go out. Employees know which buttons to avoid. Developers have memorized the fragile parts. A slow process has a workaround, an unreliable integration has a script, and an application scheduled for retirement two years ago receives another small update.
This can continue for a surprisingly long time. The breaking point often comes when keeping the old environment alive begins interfering with everything the company wants to build next.
Digital transformation consulting services become valuable here because the job is no longer simply maintaining software. Someone has to decide what deserves another repair, what can be separated from the old environment, and what has finally become more expensive to keep than to change.
These eight companies approach that work from noticeably different angles.
1. Avenga
Avenga is a strong first choice when the legacy issue has spread beyond one application.
Perhaps an old platform is slowing releases, but replacing it also means dealing with cloud infrastructure, APIs, data, testing, and several newer products already connected to it. Solving one piece in isolation can simply move the bottleneck somewhere else.
Avenga works across software product engineering, modernization, cloud, data, AI, QA, and managed services. One accountable delivery team can remain involved while the shape of the work changes, with continuous visibility into delivery performance. Avenga’s model is designed to support up to 50% faster software delivery.
A modernization program can therefore cover several kinds of work without treating each as a separate project:
- Reworking parts of an existing application
- Building replacement functionality
- Updating APIs and integrations
- Moving appropriate workloads to the cloud
- Improving access to data
- Introducing automated and continuous testing
- Adding new digital capabilities around older systems
- Supporting the resulting environment after migration
QA is especially relevant in legacy work. Old systems tend to contain behavior that nobody wants to lose, including behavior that was never properly documented. Avenga covers functional and non-functional testing alongside automation, performance, security, usability, compliance, mobile, embedded, and data quality testing.
The goal is not to make everything new at once. It is to stop the old environment from dictating how every new piece of software has to be built.
2. Itransition
“Legacy” is a description, not a diagnosis. A twenty-year-old application that runs quietly, costs little to maintain, and rarely changes may deserve far less attention than a five-year-old system that blocks releases every month.
Itransition is useful when a company needs to make those distinctions. Its work covers custom software, application modernization, cloud migration, integration, QA, consulting, and maintenance.
There are several possible outcomes for an older system:
- Keep it where the business case for change is weak.
- Put a cleaner interface around functionality that still works.
- Pull heavily used capabilities out of a larger application.
- Migrate selected components rather than the entire environment.
- Rebuild the areas creating the most friction.
- Retire software whose job has already moved elsewhere.
This is a more practical starting point than assuming modernization means a rewrite.
For businesses with a mixed technology estate, Itransition offers room to work application by application instead of forcing everything into one transformation pattern.
3. EPAM
Things look different when a company has accumulated legacy software across regions, acquisitions, departments, and generations of IT leadership.
There may be no single old platform to replace. Instead, several applications perform overlapping jobs, important data moves between them, and every proposed retirement uncovers another dependency.
EPAM has the scale for this end of the market. A large modernization effort may involve:
- Enterprise applications that cannot stop during migration
- Regional variations of the same platform
- Shared services used by several business units
- Data spread across old and new environments
- Cloud adoption happening at different speeds
- Customer-facing products still tied to aging core systems
EPAM’s wider capabilities span application and platform engineering, cloud, data, integration, DevOps, experience design, and quality engineering.
The value of that scale is fairly specific. When hundreds of dependencies are involved, modernization becomes a coordination exercise partly. The partner has to work across the estate rather than optimize one application while ignoring what surrounds it.
4. ELEKS
A rewrite can be just as shortsighted as another patch.
A team may replace an old monolith with a modern architecture and discover that releases are still difficult. Business logic may have been copied rather than reconsidered. New services can inherit the same awkward dependencies. Cloud infrastructure does not automatically make an application easier to maintain.
ELEKS is worth considering before the destination has been decided. Its combination of consulting, architecture, software engineering, cloud, data, cybersecurity, UX, DevOps, and QA gives the technical questions some room before implementation takes over.
An early investigation might concentrate on:
- The dependencies responsible for most development delays
- Business logic that still belongs in the future system
- Components that can survive without major changes
- Security constraints that affect the new architecture
- Data that needs to move and data that does not
- Assumptions worth testing before a larger build begins
That work can produce a much smaller modernization project than the one originally imagined. In other cases, it can show why a larger rebuild is justified.
Either result is better than choosing an architecture because it happens to be newer.
5. N-iX
Modernization creates an awkward staffing problem. The engineers who know the old system best are usually the same people needed to help replace it.
They cannot abandon production for a year while the new platform is built. New hires need time to understand years of accumulated logic. Meanwhile, ordinary product work continues.
N-iX can provide additional engineering capacity during this overlap. Its teams work across frontend and backend development, microservices, cloud-native applications, APIs, DevOps, QA, and data engineering.
The extra capacity can be divided in several ways:
- An external team owns a new component.
- Internal engineers remain focused on the existing platform.
- Both teams share a migration workstream.
- N-iX takes responsibility for selected integrations.
- Additional QA supports old and new systems during transition.
This does not require the company to hand over its entire technology organization.
For businesses with strong internal engineering leadership, that can be the attraction. The direction remains internal while the number of people available to execute it increases.
6. SoftServe
Replacing an application can leave the real problem untouched.
A new interface may still depend on poor-quality data. A cloud migration can preserve inefficient deployment practices. Better code does not remove manual work between systems that were never properly connected.
SoftServe is relevant when the modernization boundary needs to be wider. Its work around application engineering connects with cloud, data and analytics, AI, DevOps, quality engineering, and experience design.
A useful way to inspect an aging environment is to look beyond the code:
- Where do employees compensate manually for system limitations?
- Which data has to be copied or reconciled repeatedly?
- What makes releases unnecessarily difficult?
- Which workloads cannot scale comfortably?
- Where are customers still exposed to old technical constraints?
- Which repetitive processes could disappear after systems are connected properly?
This changes the conversation. An old application may be only one symptom of a technology environment that has grown in pieces.
SoftServe has enough adjacent expertise to follow those connections instead of stopping once the application itself looks newer.
7. Intellias
One of the clearest signs of legacy debt is a process everybody has stopped questioning.
An employee opens three applications to answer one customer request. Information is entered twice because two systems never learned to share it. A report is exported, edited, and uploaded somewhere else every Friday. None of this feels like a technology crisis because people have become very good at doing it.
Intellias is an interesting partner when modernization needs to reach these everyday workflows.
Its technology work covers software engineering, digital platforms, cloud, data, AI, and related areas. That allows modernization to begin with what people should no longer have to do.
A useful list might be surprisingly ordinary:
- Stop entering the same customer details twice.
- Remove a manual transfer between two systems.
- Put related tasks into one usable workflow.
- Make current data available without waiting for a batch update.
- Remove duplicate functionality.
- Let a new digital service use information already held elsewhere.
These are small sentences for changes that can require substantial engineering underneath.
They also give a modernization program something concrete to prove. If the technology has changed but daily work has not, the company may simply have replaced one technical estate with another.
8. ScienceSoft
Not every legacy problem needs to become a company-wide transformation.
Sometimes one application is expensive to maintain, difficult to test, and increasingly awkward to integrate with newer software. Fixing that application properly may be enough.
ScienceSoft fits these more contained assignments through its work in software development, modernization, testing, cloud, data, and consulting.
The sequence can stay fairly grounded:
- Understand the application and the systems around it.
- Find the parts creating the most risk or maintenance work.
- Separate necessary business behavior from historical baggage.
- Define what will remain and what will change.
- Modernize or migrate the selected components.
- Test the new environment against the old requirements.
- Stabilize it before opening another modernization front.
There is nothing glamorous about this approach. That is partly the point.
A company with one troublesome business system does not need to manufacture a grand transformation narrative around it. It needs the system to become easier to operate, change, and eventually replace.
The most expensive legacy feature may be the workaround
Maintenance budgets tell only part of the story. Look at the work happening around the software as well.
An employee spends ten minutes correcting every imported order. QA reruns the same manual checks because automation was never added. Developers avoid changing one module because nobody is confident about the side effects. A release waits until the one engineer who understands an old integration returns from vacation.
Each problem looks small on its own. Together, they can consume far more time than the visible maintenance bill suggests.
This is where digital transformation consulting services have a useful job to do: make that hidden cost visible before deciding what deserves investment.
The answer will not always be replacement. A small integration change may eliminate hours of manual work. Better automated testing may make an old application safe enough to keep for several more years. One troublesome component may be responsible for most of the delays.
Modernization gets cheaper when the actual constraint is identified first.
Give the old system one last job
Before retiring an application, use it to explain itself. Which workflows depend on it? Who uses them? What data enters and leaves? Which exceptions have accumulated? What happens at month-end, during peak demand, or when an external service is unavailable?
The answers are rarely contained in technical documentation alone. Operations knows one part. Finance knows another. Support remembers customer cases that exposed unusual behavior. Long-serving employees know why a strange step was added years ago. Developers know where the code is fragile.
Collecting that knowledge before migration can prevent a new system from being technically cleaner and operationally worse.
It also exposes features that no longer deserve to survive. Modernization should carry forward necessary business logic, not every historical decision simply because it already exists.
Stop measuring progress by how much has been rebuilt
A team can replace thousands of lines of old code without making the company noticeably easier to change.
A better measure is what no longer needs special treatment. One deployment no longer requires a weekend. A product team can release without coordinating with three unrelated systems. Employees stop reconciling two versions of the same data. An old server disappears. New engineers no longer need a month to understand one fragile component.
Those are signs that technical history is losing its grip on current work. The eight companies above offer different routes there. Avenga can keep modernization connected to product engineering, QA, cloud, data, and ongoing delivery. Itransition gives companies several options between preservation and replacement. EPAM can handle legacy estates whose complexity comes from sheer enterprise scale. ELEKS is useful when the architecture deserves investigation before another large commitment.
N-iX can add engineering capacity while old and new systems coexist. SoftServe can push modernization beyond the application into cloud, data, AI, and operations. Intellias brings attention back to the workflows technology is supposed to improve. ScienceSoft can keep a contained legacy problem contained.
A successful modernization does not need to make every system new. It should leave fewer parts of the business saying, “We cannot change that because of the old system.”